==========================================
1. United Press International, October 21, 1981,
Wednesday, PM cycle, Domestic News, 1386 words, by Randall V. Berlage
* * *
DATELINE: NEW [YORK] CITY, N.Y.
Weather Underground fugitive Kathy Boudin was arrested with three others
in a $1.6 million terrorist-style armored car robbery in which two
police officers and a guard were killed, officials disclosed today.
Miss Boudin's capture ended her decade-long flight through the nation's
radical underworld that began when an explosion at an urban guerrilla
bomb factory leveled a Greenwich Village townhouse in March 1970.
Police using bloodhounds pressed a search in a wooded area near the
scene of the robbery for four more suspects who escaped after the
Tuesday night armored car ambush and subsequent gun battle.
Arrested with Miss Boudin were Judith Clark, 32, James Lester Hackford,
32, and Samuel Brown, 41, all of New York.
Miss Boudin, 38, was originally identified as Barbara Edson before a
fingerprint check established her real identity. Police also were unsure
of the identity of Brown, who used two other names when arrested.
All four were held on charges of murder.
Police Chief Robert Schakenberg told a news conference a political
motive had not been ruled out in the armored car heist, which he
described as "well planned." He said a number of shotgun and automatic
rifles and pistols had been recovered.
Miss Clark was believed to be the same person who filed a $5.5 million
against the U.S. government charging federal agents tapped her phone in
a bid to locate Miss Boudin, who had been a fugitive since the March 6,
1970 townhouse blast in Greenwich Village.
Three people were killed in the blast. They were [identified] as Diana Oughton, 28,
Theodore Gold, 23, and Terry Robins.
The ambush of the Brink's armored car occurred Tuesday. Three men armed
with shotguns and automatic weapons opened fire on guards making a
pickup at the Nanuet National Bank at the Nanuet Mall, about 25 miles
north of New York City.
The robbers forced open the truck, took six money bags and fled in a
van, later splitting up into two vehicles -- a truck and a car -- with
five accomplices.
At the crowded entrance to the New York State Thruway, the getaway truck
was stopped by a police roadblock, but when officers pulled two people
from the front, three other robbers burst from the rear, killing two
police officers and stealing cars to escape.
Police managed to capture one woman. That woman, who claimed to be
Barbara Edson, turned out to be the long-sought Kathy Boudin.
All three robbers who fled Nanuet in the car were caught when they
crashed in nearby Nyack. Police found the money taken from the Brinks
truck -- $1.58 million -- in both vehicles.
Brown was arraigned at Nyack Hospital by Justice Robert Lewis. No plea
was entered and no bail was set. He was treated for head wounds that
hospital officials said appeared to have been inflicted in a pistol
whipping.
Miss Boudin was among the last of the Weather Underground members still
at large.
The Greenwich Village townhouse belonged to the father of Cathlyn Platt
Wilkerson, another member of the Weather Un-derground who surrendered
July 8, 1980 to face charges involving the explosion.
Miss Wilkerson and Miss Boudin were seen leaving the townhouse at the
time of the blast. The townhouse contained enough explosives to level an
entire city block.
The Weather Underground was spawned in the turbulence of the anti-Vietnam
War protests of the late 1960s.
The Weather group went "underground" in December 1969 and soon after
launched a campaign of bombings aimed at toppling the
"establishment."
The bombing campaign reached a climax with the town-house explosion, but
the group conducted sporadic bombing attacks in the 1970s.
In December 1980 two other top Weather members, Bernardine Dohrn and
William Ayres, surrendered to authorities.
Former members of the group said at the time the surrender by Miss Dohrn,
the ackowledged leader, and Ayers in Chicago meant the end of the group.
Since its founding in 1969, Miss Dohrn was the most important member of
a group that apparently grew smaller as the 1970s progressed. She was at
the forefront of a factional fight in 1977 -- an apparent last gasp to
keep the group alive, two former members said.
"Just look at the list of people," said one former member, who dropped
out of the Underground in 1977.
"There's nobody left. How do you have an underground when there's
nobody underground? People have moved on, given up. They (former
members) are doing positive things in their communities. The ideas
haven't died, just the whole underground thing," said the former
member, who spoke on the condition there be no identification.
The FBI spent more than $1 million hunting Miss Dorhn, but disagreed
with the former member's analysis.
In December 1980, two other top Weathermen, Bernardine Dohrn and William
Ayres, surrendered to authorities.
Former members of the group sat at the time the surrender by Miss Dohrn,
the ackowledged leader, and Ayers in Chicago meant the end of the group.
Since its founding in 1969, Miss Dohrn was the most important member of
a group that apparently grew smaller as the 1970s progressed. She was at
the forefront of a factional fight in 1977, an apparent last gasp to
keep the group alive, two former members said.
"Just look at the list of people," said one former member, who dropped
out of the Underground in 1977.
"There's nobody left. How do you have an underground when there's
nobody underground? People have moved on, given up. They (former Weather
Underground members) are doing positive things in their communities. The
ideas haven't died, just the whole underground thing," said the former
member, who spoke on the condition there be no identification.
The FBI, which spent more than $1 million hunting Miss Dorhn, disagreed
with the former member's analysis.
[This section is repeated - SC]
"The underground worked and it still works," Tom Locke, former head of
the FBI's New York Fugitive squad, said. He added, however, that the FBI
has given up intense searches for radicals.
"We can assume there are still people underground that are just waiting
for a cause," Locke said.
And when Ayers refused to answer questions in Chicago in December 1980
he said he did so because "the survival of others depends on our
silence."
But the former member said there were only a handful of members in 1977
and even fewer now.
"They (Miss Dohrn and Ayers) could have stayed under forever
and it wouldn't have made any difference. The movement as it was in 1970 is
dead," the source said.
Two members of the Underground are still wanted on state or federal
charges. One is Jeff Jones, wanted for a Hoboken, N.J., "bomb factory"
incident in 1979. The FBI is seeking Silas "Trim" Bissell, a Seattle
radical accused of bombing an ROTC building at the University of
Washington in 1969.
The source said Bissell played a role in the 1977 split. Miss Dohrn and
a faction the former member called the "official leadership"
apparently wanted to keep the group underground, but another faction,
the "revolutionary committee," wanted to surface.
The former member said Ayers was in the faction that wanted to come up,
but Dohrn talked him into staying with her, apparently living on New
York's West Side.
Five members of the "revolutionary committee," including Bissell's
wife Judith, were arrested in Houston in November 1978. Those arrested
included Clayton Van Lydegraf, the leader of the group who was
Washington State Secretary of the Communist Party in the 1940s.
The five were convicted in a plot to bomb the office of conservative
California state Sen. John Briggs and are all now in jail.
After the 1977 split members of the "official leadership" began
appearing. Mark Rudd, Phoebe Hirsh and others surfaced, were given light
sentences and are now free.
Wilkerson began serving a 3-year prison term in January for building
bombs at the Greenwich Village townhouse.
The Weather Underground was an offshoot of the Tom Hayden-inspired
Students for a Democratic Society, founded in Port Huron, Mich., in
1962.
SDS split into three factions in June 1969 and Rudd and Miss Dohrn took
members of the Weathermen to a training camp near Cleveland to get ready
for the "revolutionary war."
Miss Dohrn led her helmeted troops into Chicago for a spree of
rock-throwing and battles with police during the "Days of Rage" in
October 1969.
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
2. United Press International, October 21, 1981, 514 words,
Wednesday, BC cycle, Domestic News, 514 words
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK
The capture of fugitive radical Kathy Boudin almost closes the net
around the Weather Underground, a group born in the anti-war rage of the
late 1960s.
Miss Boudin, the daughter of prominent New York attorney Leonard Boudin,
was arrested with three others Tuesday in a $1.6 million armored car
robbery north of New York City in which two police officers and a
Brink's guard were killed.
Her capture in such violent circumstances mirrored the urban guerrilla
methods the Weather Underground admired. Ironically, however, most of
the Weather leaders have surrendered peacefully in the past few years
to face various charges.
Still wanted on state or federal charges are Jeff Jones, sought for a
Hoboken, N.J., "bomb factory" incident in 1979, and Silas "Trim"
Bissell, a Seattle radical accused of bombing an ROTC building at the
University of Washington in 1969.
Last December, major Weather Underground leaders Bernadine [sic] Dohrn and
William Ayers surrendered in Chicago. After Miss Dohrn and Ayers were
given suspended sentences, other former radicals said the group was as
good as dead.
The Weather Underground began as the Weatherman, an offshot of the Tom
Hayden-inspired Students for a Democratic Society founded in Port Huron,
Mich., in 1962.
SDS split into three factions in June 1969 and Mark Rudd and Miss Dohrn
took members of Weatherman to a training camp near Cleveland to get
ready for the "revolutionary war."
Miss Dohrn led her helmeted troops into Chicago for a spree of
rock-throwing and battles with police during the "Days of Rage" in
October 1969.
The group set up a bomb factory in a fashionable townhouse in New York's
Greenwich Village and, on March 6, 1970, a gigantic explosion leveled
the structure.
Three people were killed in the blast, including Diana Oughton, 28, and
Theodore Gold, 23. The third person, a male, was never identified.
The townhouse belonged to the father of Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson, another
member of the Weather Underground who was seen leaving the residence
with Miss Boudin shortly after the blast. FBI agents found enough
explosives left in the structure to level an entire city block.
Miss Wilkerson surrendered to face charges from the blast on July 8,
1980 and is serving a three-year sentence.
The Weather Underground was split in a factional fight in 1977. Miss
Dorhn and a faction a former member called the "official leadership"
apparently wanted to keep the group underground, but another faction,
the "revolutionary committee," wanted to surface.
After the 1977 split, members of the "official leadership" began
appearing. Mark Rudd, Phoebe Hirsh and others surfaced, were given
light sentences and are now free.
Five members of the "revolutionary committee," including Bissell's
wife Judith, were arrested in Houston in November 1978. Others arrested
included Clayton Van Lydegraf, the leader of the group who was
Washington State Secretary of the Communist Party in the 1940s.
The five were convicted in a plot to bomb the office of conservative
California state Sen. John Briggs.
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
3. "Today's Focus: Arrest of One of the Last Roving
Radicals," The
Associated Press, October 21, 1981, Wednesday, AM cycle, Domestic
News, 889 words, By Jerry Schwartz, Associated Press Writer
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Watergate has come and gone. Communists control Vietnam and Cambodia.
Hair is short. Campus protests are rare.
But the Weather Underground, a radical coterie of wealthy children now
entering middle age, has continued its struggle against the system. Now
one of its last members has surfaced -- against her will.
Katherine Boudin, 38, was arrested Tuesday night and charged in the
robbery of a Brink's armored car in Nanuet, N.Y., which left two police
officers and one guard dead.
Also arrested was another former member of the Weather Underground,
Judith Clark, 31, who served seven months in Chicago for radical
violence. She was not a fugitive when arrested in the Brink's case.
When she was arrested, Miss Boudin gave her name as Barbara Edson. But
her fingerprints gave her away and officials announced Wednesday that
they had arrested one of the last roving radicals of the 1960s.
FBI officials said there is just one, well-known member of the Weather
Under ground still at large -- Jeffre [sic] Jones, 29, a graduate of Antioch
College. The others have either been arrested or have turned themselves
in.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," went the
Bob Dylan song that gave the Weatherman its name.
And you don't need a digital watch to know times have changed since the
night, 11 1/2 years ago, when a building on West 11th Street exploded,
sending two naked women screaming into the Greenwich Village darkness.
Police said the 19th century brownstone was a bomb factory. Rumor had it
the explosives were destined for Columbia University, site of numerous
violent protests during the Vietnam War era.
Authorities found 60 unexploded sticks of dynamite and 100 blasting caps
in the rubble, along with the bodies of Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton and
another man, never identified.
Eyewitnesses identified one of the two women who fled as Cathlyn Platt
Wilkerson, daughter of an advertising executive who owned the townhouse.
No one ever identified the other woman, but on the basis of credit cards
and papers found in the rubble, police went looking for Miss Boudin,
daughter of a civil rights lawyer.
Miss Wilkerson was 25; Miss Boudin, 26. The two women went to a
neighbor's home, showered, dressed -- and disappeared.
They joined the Weather Underground, a network of fugitives who
specialized in violent political action. Originally, they were the
Weatherman, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society which led
1969's "Days of Rage" demonstrations in Chicago.
The Weatherman, according to a Senate committee, was a group "dedicated
to the violent overthrow of established power in the United States."
They backed their revolutionary spirit with action. The FBI has blamed
them for the 1971 bombing of the U.S. Capitol, the 1976 prison escape of
drug guru Timothy Leary, the 1974 bombing of Gulf Oil headquarters in
Pittsburgh and other crimes.
Their leadership was of the same ilk as Miss Boudin and Miss Wilkerson
-- well-to-do, college-educated youth. There was Bernardine Dohrn, a
University of Chicago valedictorian; William Ayers, son of a former
president of Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co.; Mark Rudd, leader of the
insurrection at Columbia University.
While the rest of the country moved beyond the Vietnam era, the Weather
Underground stayed underground, hunted and still strident.
But in 1977, sources said members of the Weather Underground's Central
Committee had proposed "inversion" -- a program under which the
leadership would turn itself in to authorities.
An underground documentary, produced in 1975, was part of that process,
according to the sources. Miss Boudin, Miss Wilkerson, Miss Dohrn, Rudd
and Ayers all appeared in the film.
Miss Dohrn later issued a tape-recorded message denouncing the plan, but
the process by which the Weather Underground returned to the surface had
already begun.
In 1977, Rudd turned himself in. He was fined $2,000 and placed on two
years' probation for his part in the "Days of Rage." In 1978, Howard Machtinger, considered an under-ground leader, gave up.
In 1979, the FBI announced it had dropped warrants against the
Weathermen at large. In July 1980, Miss Wilkerson turned herself in,
citing a feeling of "isolation" after 10 years on the lam; she's now
serving a three-year term for possession of dynamite.
Miss Dohrn surrendered last December and was sentenced to three years'
probation and a $1,500 fine for the "Days of Rage." She had spent much
of the last few years unnoticed, a waitress in a Manhattan restaurant.
She lived with Ayers, who had remained underground although not a
fugitive.
Last year, Abbie Hoffman surfaced and went to jail on his drug
conviction. Although not a member of the Weather Underground, he has
said he had been in contact with members of the group.
Others, less known, turned themselves in, and attacks credited to the
Weather Underground have long since ceased.
It is known that Weather Underground members were in touch with each
other and were aided by a support system. But as each member surfaced,
he or she refused to give authorities any information about life
underground.
"Given the choice of prison or cooperation with the perpetrators of
global violence, I chose to join the folks inside, for they are my
people," Miss Wilkerson said after her sentencing.
Copyright 1981 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
==========================================
4. "Brink's Suspect Embraced Radical Causes," The Associated Press,
October 21, 1981, Wednesday, BC cycle, Domestic News, 750 words, by
Dolores Barclay, Associated Press Writer
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Weather Underground fugitive Kathy Boudin, identified Wednesday as a
murder suspect in a bloody Brink's armored car robbery, sprang from a
nest of liberalism, where strong ideals and principles formed the
lifeblood of family life.
Her father, attorney Leonard Boudin, long had embraced causes few
lawyers would touch. He represented Paul Robeson in his battle to win a
passport after the entertainer was touched by McCarthyism and later
defended Dr. Benjamin Spock in his 1968 anti-draft case.
When Boudin walked into a Harrisburg, Pa., court in 1971 to defend the
Rev. Philip Berrigan and seven others against political conspiracy
charges, he passed a poster of his daughter.
There was Kathy Boudin, Social Security No. 134-34-8330, magna cum laude
Bryn Mawr College, with rapists, murderers, robbers and the scourge of
society. The FBI poster said she "has been associated with persons who
advocate use of explosives and may have acquired firearms. Consider
dangerous."
Miss Boudin finally was arrested Tuesday and charged with murder in a
$1.6 million Brink's armored car robbery in Nanuet, N.Y., in which a
guard and two police officers were killed.
Her father used the legal system to insure justice in civil liberties
cases, and her brother graduated from Harvard Law School to clerk with
Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan of the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Miss Boudin was intent on toppling the very structure that her
family tenaciously held.
According to her early writings -- those that emerged before an explosion
at 18 W. 11th Street on March 6, 1970, sent her into a decade of life
underground, Miss Boudin wanted a movement that would attack the U.S.
legal system -- "courts, grand juries, legislative committees, the
ideology itself."
She sought the ruination of what she called "the imperialist state," and
believed "revolutionaries are created in struggle and not through
protest or persuasion."
Miss Boudin was born in New York on May 19, 1943. She went to private
schools and graduated from Elisabeth Irwin High School. At Bryn Mawr,
nestled on Philadelphia's Main Line, she majored in Russian language and
literature.
In the early 1960s, when the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s passive
resistance drive swept through the South and parts of the North,
attacking a system that was separate but unequal, Miss Boudin, scion of
a liberal lawyer, easily assimilated the cause.
She participated in civil rights demonstrations in nearby Chester, Pa.,
and was listed as co-chairman of a 1964 conference on the "Second
American Revolution."
Her senior year, she went to the Soviet Union, where during 15 months of
study and talk, she grew just as disillusioned with the Soviet system as
she was with the United States. She discovered that many young Russians
were dissatisfied with socialism and did not believe her stories of
repression in the United States.
After college, Miss Boudin spent about three years in Cleveland, Ohio,
as a "community organizer." She was with demonstrators in Chicago during
the 1968 Democratic National Convention and was arrested for
setting off a stink bomb in the Palmer House.
In 1969, she joined with Bernardine Dohrn, Terry Robbins and other
members of the Students for a Democratic Society national action staff,
to urge armed defense.
She was among six SDS leaders who went to Cuba that year to meet
Vietcong and North Vietnamese representatives.
Later that year, she was arrested in Chicago for aggravated battery for
allegedly attacking a police officer during the Chicago 7 conspiracy
trial.
In December she was indicted and freed on $10,000 bail after again
allegedly striking a police officer, this time in Chicago's Grant Park
during a demonstration with the Weatherman faction of SDS.
Several Weather Underground fugitives have surfaced in re-cent years.
Mark Rudd surrendered in September 1977 after seven years on the run to
face charges of criminal trespass during the 1968 Columbia University
student riots.
Miss Dohrn, 38, surrendered to authorities last year. She was sentenced
earlier this year to two counts of aggravated battery and two counts of
bail jumping. The charges were filed in connection with her
participation in a 1969 anti-war protest in Chicago known as the Days of
Rage.
Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson, who fled naked from the brown-stone with Miss
Boudin, surrendered last year after 10 years as a fugitive. She was
sentenced to three years in prison for her role in the fatal 1970
explosion.
Copyright 1981 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
==========================================
5. "Boudin still wanted for 'Days of Rage'," United Press
International, October 21, 1981, Wednesday, PM cycle, Domestic News,
310 words, by Marcella S. Kreiter
* * *
DATELINE: CHICAGO
Kathy Boudin, arrested in Nyack, N.Y., in a bungled armored car robbery,
is wanted on aggravated battery and conspiracy charges stemming from the
1969 "Days of Rage," authorities said today.
The Weather Underground fugitive was among four people arrested Tuesday
in the holdup, which left two police officers and a Brink's guard dead.
Cliff Johnson, a spokesman for the Cook County state's attorney's
office, said Miss Boudin, 38, daughter of prominent New York attorney
Leonard Boudin, was indicted on the aggravated battery charge on May
13, 1970, and on the conspiracy charge on March 16, 1970. Bond was set
at $50,000 and $75,000, respectively.
Johnson said the state's attorney's office still is interested in
prosecuting Miss Boudin on the charges.
"Yeah, we would still be interested in her," Johnson said. "But in light
of the charges in New York, we'll have to wait and see."
Miss Boudin and 11 other members of the Weather Under-ground, including
leader Bernardine Dohrn who surrendered late last year, were indicted on
charges involving a 1969 student rampage through the streets of
Chicago's Near North Side and Loop known as the "Days of Rage."
Miss Boudin also was sought by the FBI on a federal fugitive warrant
stemming from a bomb explosion that leveled a Greenwich Village
townhouse on March 6, 1970, killing three people.
The Weather Underground, a radical offshoot of the Students for a
Democratic Society, was formed in 1969. The group first gained national
attention for the Days of Rage.
Miss Boudin's capture nearly closes the net around the Weather
Underground.
Still wanted on state or federal charges are Jeff Jones, sought for a
Hoboken, N.J., "bomb factory" incident in 1979, and Silas "Trim"
Bissell, a Seattle radical accused of bombing an ROTC building at the
University of Washington in 1969.
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
6. "Kathy Boudin -- radical from the past," United Press
International, October 21, 1981, Wednesday, BC cycle, Domestic News,
628 words
* * *
A 1970 FBI wanted poster on Kathy Boudin, the Weather Underground
radical, lists her occupations as camp counselor and swimming
instructor.
The listing is a an indication of the 20-year trail she traveled from
her role as a young, brilliant and committed college student to that of
a 38-year-old murder and armored car holdup suspect arrested in a bloody
shootout in Nyack, N.Y.
It is one of the most extreme of the life stories to emerge from that
group affluent young people who chose radical politics to topple the
"establishment" during the troubled and turbulent 1960s.
Miss Boudin, who has been wanted by authorities since 1970 in connection
with a bomb explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse that killed three
people, was born in New York City on May 19, 1943.
The daughter of Leonard Boudin, a successful lawyer who championed
various civil liberty causes, she attended private schools in the city
and graduated from Elisabeth Irwin High School, where she was described
as a bright student and a good athlete.
She attended Bryn Mawr, an exclusive liberal arts college in a
Philadelphia suburb, where she became active in the civil rights
movement of the early 1960s.
Her commitment to radical politics emerged during her college years, and
she spent 1965, her senior year, at the University of Moscow and lived
for a time in Leningrad.
Her stay in the Soviet Union was a disillusioning experience in some
respects. She later complained that Soviet students were docile and that
the dissidents among them advocated the establishment of a free-market
system similar to the one she was intent on overthrowing.
In 1966, she went to Cleveland and worked there for several years as a
community organizer. Miss Boudin quickly moved into the anti-Vietnam war
movement and was arrested in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic
convention and charged with tossing a "stink bomb." She was also named
as a co-conspirator in a federal indictment against the Chicago Seven.
She frequently wrote for radical journals and became a leading force in
the radical Weatherman movement.
Miss Boudin and 11 other members of the Weather movement, including
leader Bernardine Dohrn, who surrendered late last year, were indicted
on charges stemming from a 1969 student rampage through the streets of
the Near North Side and Loop known as the "Days of Rage."
Chicago authorities said Wednesday they still would like to prosecute
her on aggravated battery and conspiracy charges.
She and about 100 other members of the group went "underground" in
December 1969 and planned a bombing campaign aimed at bringing down the
system.
It was the beginning of a 12-year odyssey that ended only Tuesday.
On March 6, 1970, a tremendous explosion ripped apart a Greenwich
Village townhouse that police said the group had used as a "bomb
factory."
Three people were killed in the blast -- Diana Oughton, 28, Theodore
Gold, 23, and a man identified as Terry Robins.
The townhouse belonged to the father of Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson, another
member of the Weather Underground who surrendered to face charges
stemming from the blast on July 8, 1980.
Miss Wilkerson and Miss Boudin were seen leaving the townhouse shortly
after the blast, which left enough explosives to level an entire city
block.
Local and federal officials conducted an intense hunt for Miss Boudin
and other members of the group but the hunt waned as the decade unfolded
and most of the wanted members of the group surrendered to authorities.
Miss Boudin remained at large, however, until her arrest in Nyack, N.Y.,
on Tuesday. She and three other suspects are charged with murdering two
police officers and a Brinks guard during the armed holdup of a Brinks
armored car at a shopping mall.
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
7. "Arrest of One of the Last Roving Radicals," The Associated Press,
October 22, 1981, Thursday, PM cycle, Domestic News, 909 words, by Jerry
Schwartz, Associated Press Writer
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Radicalized during protests against the Vietnam War, members of the
Weather Underground have continued their rebellion against the system
while many of their peers became part of the establishment.
Members of the Weather Underground lived a life on the run, often after
being charged in violent protests. But one by one they surfaced, either
because they had been discovered and arrested or because they wanted to
turn themselves in.
Now one of the group's last members has reappeared.
Police said Katherine Boudin, 38, was arrested as a suspect in a $1.6
million Brink's armored car robbery and shootout in Nanuet, N.Y., that
left two policemen and a Brink's guard dead.
Also arrested was another member of the Weather Under-ground, Judith
Clark, 31, who served seven months in Chicago for radical violence. She
was not a fugitive when arrested in the Brink's case.
When she was arrested, Miss Boudin gave her name as Bar-bara Edson. But
her fingerprints gave her away and officials announced Wednesday that
they had arrested one of the last roving radicals of the 1960s.
FBI officials said there is just one, well-known member of the Weather
Underground still at large -- Jeffrey Jones, 29, a graduate of Antioch
College.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," went the
Bob Dylan song that gave the Weatherman its name.
And you don't need a digital watch to know times have changed since the
night, 11 1/2 years ago, when a building on West 11th Street exploded,
sending two naked women screaming into the Greenwich Village darkness.
Police said the 19th century brownstone was a bomb factory. Rumor had it
the explosives were destined for Columbia University, site of numerous
violent protests during the Vietnam War era.
Authorities found 60 unexploded sticks of dynamite and 100 blasting caps
in the rubble, along with the bodies of Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton and
another man never identified.
Eyewitnesses identified one of the two women who fled as Cathlyn Platt
Wilkerson, daughter of an advertising executive who owned the townhouse.
No one ever identified the other woman, but on the basis of credit cards
and papers found in the rubble, police went looking for Miss Boudin,
daughter of a civil rights lawyer.
Miss Wilkerson was 25; Miss Boudin, 26. The two women went to a
neighbor's home, showered, dressed -- and disappeared.
They joined the Weather Underground, a network of fugitives who
specialized in violent political action. Originally, they were the
Weatherman, a faction of the Students for a Democratic Society which led
1969's "Days of Rage" demonstrations in Chicago.
The Weatherman, according to a Senate committee, was a group "dedicated
to the violent overthrow of established power in the United States."
They backed their revolutionary spirit with action. The FBI has blamed
them for the 1971 bombing of the U.S. Capitol, the 1976 prison escape of
drug guru Timothy Leary, the 1974 bombing of Gulf Oil headquarters in
Pittsburgh and other crimes.
Their leadership was of the same ilk as Miss Boudin and Miss Wilkerson
-- well-to-do, college-educated youth. There was Bernardine Dohrn, a
University of Chicago valedictorian; William Ayers, son of a former
president of Chicago's Commonwealth Edison Co.; Mark Rudd, leader of the
insurrection at Columbia University.
While the rest of the country moved beyond the Vietnam era, the Weather
Underground stayed underground, hunted and still strident.
But in 1977, sources said members of the Weather Under-ground's Central
Committee had proposed "inversion" -- a program under which the
leadership would turn itself in to authorities.
An underground documentary, produced in 1975, was part of that process,
according to the sources. Miss Boudin, Miss Wilkerson, Miss Dohrn, Rudd
and Ayers all appeared in the film.
Miss Dohrn later issued a tape-recorded message denouncing the plan, but
the process by which the Weather Under-ground returned to the surface
had already begun.
In 1977, Rudd turned himself in. He was fined $2,000 and placed on two
years' probation for his part in the "Days of Rage." In 1978, Howard Machtinger, considered an under-ground leader, gave up.
In 1979, the FBI announced it had dropped warrants against the
Weathermen at large. In July 1980, Miss Wilkerson turned herself in,
citing a feeling of "isolation" after 10 years on the lam; she's now
serving a three-year term for possession of dynamite.
Miss Dohrn surrendered last December and was sentenced to three years'
probation and a $1,500 fine for the "Days of Rage." She had spent much
of the last few years unnoticed, a waitress in a Manhattan restaurant.
She lived with Ayers, who had remained underground although not a
fugitive.
Last year, Abbie Hoffman surfaced and went to jail on his drug
conviction. Although not a member of the Weather Underground, he has
said he had been in contact with members of the group.
Others, less known, turned themselves in, and attacks credited to the
Weather Underground have long since ceased.
It is known that Weather Underground members were in touch with each
other and were aided by a support system. But as each member surfaced,
he or she refused to give authorities any information about life
underground.
"Given the choice of prison or cooperation with the perpetrators of
global violence, I chose to join the folks inside, for they are my
people," Miss Wilkerson said after her sentencing.
Copyright 1981 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
==========================================
8. "2 Women in Brink's Case Identified with Weathermen
from Start in '69,"
The New York Times, October 22, 1981, Thursday, Late City Final
Edition, Section B; Page 4, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk, 1723 words, by
Paul L. Montgomery
* * *
The lives of the two women arrested in the Brink's robbery in Nanuet,
N.Y. -- Katherine Boudin and Judith Alice Clark -- had been entwined
with the terrorist Weathermen movement since its inception in 1969. But
they had apparently gone separate ways since the armed band of 40 or so
radicals went underground in 1970.
Miss Boudin, 38 years old, had fled with Cathlyn P. Wilkerson from an
explosion at a Weathermen bomb factory in Greenwich Village on March 6,
1970, and had eluded the authorities since.
As arrests and retirements whittled down the movement to its present
strength of perhaps 15, she remained one of its leaders and one of its
enigmas, apparently maintaining a commitment to armed violence while
most of her comrades turned themselves in and returned to work in the
world they had denounced as corrupt.
Both Drawn to Radicalism
Miss Clark, 31, had been indicted with Miss Boudin in 1969 in connection
with the Weathermen's "Days of Rage" demonstrations in Chicago, and
like her she had jumped bail. She was captured by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation at an East Side movie theater in December 1970 and served
an 18-month prison sentence in Chicago. Thereafter her life was
apparently above ground.
She lived on West 97th Street, reportedly worked in a bookstore and
participated in a civil suit against former President Richard M. Nixon
in 1978 charging illegal wiretapping. The case is still pending. Miss
Clark also was active in the radical May 19 Coalition.
Both women are from well-to-do families and attended good colleges; Miss
Boudin went to Bryn Mawr and Miss Clark to the University of Chicago.
Both turned away from established values to the disorder and violence
that characterized the late 1960's in the United States, a period that
has largely been replaced by other concerns.
Dozens of Bombings
The Weathermen, who were responsible for several dozen bombings of
public buildings and at least five deaths before they stopped open
terrorism in 1975, were the last violent remnant of Students for a
Democratic Society, a mass movement among college youth that grew out of
the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles of the 1960's.
To many, the movement seemed irrelevant to the 1980's, though the last
few members still lived a fugitive life in cells of three or four,
issuing occasional manifestos on guerrilla warfare and radical feminism.
Until yesterday most of the only news the Weathermen had made since 1975
was when another of their leaders surrendered to authorities to begin
life again above ground.
In recent years authorities had sought links between the remaining
Weather Underground and the outlaw Black Liberation Army, a group that
had participated in the murder of policemen around the country.
Chesimard Escape Mentioned
An investigator in the Essex County Prosecutor's office said there was
considerable speculation that the Weathermen had assisted in the escape
of Joanne Chesimard, the Black Liberation Army leader, from a New Jersey
prison two years ago. Miss Clark had been seen at a hearing in Manhattan
Criminal Court several years ago involving Miss Chesimard. This was
before Miss Chesimard's imprisonment.
Miss Boudin was born in New York City on May 19, 1943 and attended
private schools here. Her father is Leonard B. Boudin, a prominent civil
liberties lawyer who has defended many radicals; I.F. Stone, the writer,
is an uncle. Miss Boudin was graduated with honors in Russian literature
from Bryn Mawr in 1965 and spent her senior year studying in the Soviet
Union.
She had worked in the civil rights movement in Cambridge, Md., in 1963
and after graduation moved to Cleveland to work as a community organizer
in a Students for a Democratic Society project. Through the years she
moved up in the student movement's leadership and was arrested at the
1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, charged with throwing stink bombs
into the lobby of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
The next year, 1969, was the year of turmoil for the student movement.
Factions developed around a variety of ideologies: revolutionary
violence, nonviolence, organization of workers instead of middle-class
students, alliance with the Black Panthers. Each issue produced a
further split and by the fall the movement was in disarray. The most
visible remnant was the Weathermen, adopting their name from a line in
Bob Dylan's 1965 song "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need
a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
The Weathermen, who later changed their name to Weather-people and then
Weather Underground because of the sexism involved in the original, wore
leather jackets and crash helmets and carried clubs and chains at
demonstrations they vowed would be violent.
Against 'Everything That's Good'
"We are against everything that's good and decent in honky America,"
said an early manifesto. "We will loot and burn and destroy. We are the
incubation of your mothers' nightmares."
Miss Clark was born in Brooklyn on Nov. 23, 1949 and entered the
University of Chicago in 1967. It was in 1969 that she became associated
with the Weathermen. She had been expelled from the University of
Chicago earlier that year for participating in a demonstration.
The climax of the "Days of Rage" demonstrations was a charge by 100
women in crash helmets, swinging clubs, on an armed forces induction
center in Chicago on Oct. 9, 1969. In the ranks were Miss Boudin, Miss
Clark, Miss Wilkerson, Bernardine Dohrn and others whose names and
pictures were to appear on wanted posters around the nation. Miss Boudin
and Miss Clark were among those arrested and released on bail, and
neither appeared for trial the next spring.
The explosion at a townhouse owned by Miss Wilkerson's father at 18 West
11th Street on March 6, 1970 changed the radical movement profoundly.
The Weathermen lost stature as a result of the accident and were driven
underground.
According to later accounts, a group of at least eight from the movement
were in the house while Mr. Wilkerson was on vacation. There were at
least 60 sticks of dynamite in the basement workshop. Apparently someone
misconnected a wire while making what were later described by the
Weathermen as "antipersonnel" bombs.
Three people were killed instantly --Ted Gold, 23, a leader of the 1968
Columbia student rebellion; Diana Oughton, 28, a former member of the
Peace Corps and daughter of a banker; and Terry Robbins, 21, a former
Kenyon College student and a leader of the faction.
Two Disappear After Blast
Miss Wilkerson and her friend Miss Boudin were upstairs when the
explosions rocked the building and were driven naked and dazed into the
street. After a neighbor gave them clothes, they got into a taxi and
disappeared.
The Weathermen took responsibility for at least 20 bombings between 1970
and 1975, including explosions at Police Headquarters here in 1970, the
United States Capitol in 1971 and the State Department in 1975.
Miss Clark in the meantime had been arrested. She was attending a movie
on the East Side on Dec. 17, 1970, near the headquarters of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, and was recognized by the agent in charge of
her case. She was returned to Chicago and sentenced to 18 months in
prison.
Convictions Are Upset
Four years later the "Days of Rage" convictions were voided because
the F.B.I. had used burglaries, mail openings and illegal wiretaps in
obtaining them, and Miss Clark joined in a suit against Mr. Nixon and
his aides.
Miss Clark's last known radical association was with the two-year old
May 19 Coalition, named for the joint birthday of Malcolm X and Ho Chi
Minh. The coalition was said to be a violence-prone faction inspired by
the Weather Underground's "Prairie Fire," a guerrilla warfare manual
published in 1974. The manual begins, "We are a guerrilla organization.
We are Communist women and men, underground in the United States for
more than four years."
According to New York police sources, Eve S. Rosahn, the owner of record
of one of the cars used in the robbery Monday, was also associated with
the May 19 Coalition. Miss Rosahn, who is being sought by the police, is
a 30-year-old former Barnard College student who had a record of several
arrests in protests.
Around 1975 some leaders of the Weathermen began to talk of alternatives
to violence, and in 1977 there apparently was a split between members
favoring legal public action and those who wanted to remain clandestine
and violent. Little is known about the life of the members in those
years.
In 1977 Mark Rudd, the leader of the 1968 Columbia University takeovers
and subsequently a member of the Weathermen, became the first of the
movement's leaders to surrender. He was fined $2,000 and given two
years' probation; he now is a teacher at a technical school in
Albuquerque, N.M.
In November 1978, five adherents of the Weather Underground were
arrested in Houston and later convicted of conspiring to bomb the
offices of a conservative California state senator. All are now in jail.
In the summer of 1980, Miss Wilkerson surrended in New York. She pleaded
guilty to possession of dynamite and. began a three-year sentence last
January. She is currently in the state prison at Bedford Hills.
Last Dec. 3 in Chicago, Miss Dohrn surrendered and was fined $1,500 and
placed on probation for three years. According to Federal authorities,
there are still active cases against four members of the movement. They
are Jeff Jones and his common-law wife, Eleanor Raskin, wanted in
connection with a bomb explosion in Hoboken, N.J., in 1979; Katherine
Ann Power, wanted for bank robbery and murder; and Silas Trim Bissell,
accused of bombing a Reserve Officers Training Corps building at the
University of Washington in 1969.
GRAPHIC: Illustrations: photo of Katherine Boudin in 1970 photo of
William Kunstler, Leonard and Jean Boudin
Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
==========================================
9. "Weatherman Fugitive Arrested in N.Y.; Weather
Underground Activist Arrested After Shootout; Guard, 2 Officers Killed
in Shoot-Outs," The
Washington Post, October 22, 1981, Thursday, Final Edition, First
Section; A1, 1290 words, by Joyce Wadler, Washington Post Staff Writer
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK, Oct. 21, 1981
Weather Underground activist Katherine Boudin -- a fugitive for 11 years
-- was captured Tuesday night after a bloody armed robbery in a New York
City suburb that left two police officers and one armed guard dead.
Arrested with Boudin was Judith Clark, a Weatherman who served time for
her participation in the 1969 "Days of Rage" in Chicago, and two men
whose political backgrounds are un-known. Other suspects are still being
sought.
Police declined to speculate on the motives for the robbery, except to
say they "have not ruled out" political ones. After the identification
of Boudin and Clark today, police raided what they said was a New Jersey
bomb factory where diagrams of six New York police precincts were found.
The FBI also is taking an active interest in the case because "there
have been other bank robberies in upstate New York with a similar MO,"
FBI spokesman Lane Bonner said.
The four arrested have been charged with three counts of murder after a
robbery, and charges related to the police chase and shoot-out in
Rockland County, an affluent area 25 miles north of here.
In the $1.6 million robbery, three men armed with shotguns and automatic
weapons opened fire on a Brink's truck outside a bank, and later fled,
with their accomplices, in a car and a truck.
The truck -- in which Boudin was reportedly riding -- was stopped at a
roadblock by police. Two police officers were killed in the gunfire that
followed. Three robbers escaped, stealing cars to do so.
As Boudin ran north on the southbound lane of a freeway, she was
captured by off-duty officer Michael Koch. Koch, who frisked and cuffed
her, said Boudin was unarmed and seemed concerned for her safety.
"She was yelling, 'Don't shoot me; he shot them. I didn't,'
" Koch said.
The suspect refused to say anything more, he said.
Koch described the shoot-out scene as "chaos" and said the robbers "shot
directly at passengers in cars, they could care less."
He said he was preoccupied with a mortally wounded policeman at his
feet.
"An officer died when I was trying to revive him . . . . He lay on the
ground with a chest wound . . . with his lungs hanging out . . . . An
officer was shot at point-blank range.
"I didn't sleep all night, it bothered me, what can I say . . . . "
Boudin, 38, who gave a pseudonym at the time of her arrest, was later
identified by police through a fingerprint check.
She is being held without bail with the other suspects, Clark, 32; James
Lester Hackford, 31, and Samuel Brown, 41. Brown, according to a report
by United Press International, has a "lengthy criminal record that
included a robbery conviction."
The robbery took place Tuesday afternoon and shocked the small community
of Nyack, which lost two of its 22-officer police force in the shoot-out
at a roadblock about five miles from the site of the holdup, the Nanuet
National Bank.
A Brink's truck, with three armed guards, had just made a pick-up there,
when, according to witnesses, three men armed with shotguns and
automatic weapons opened fire on the guards as they made their way to
their truck. One guard was killed, one was wounded in the head, and the
third was shot in the shoulder.
The robbers, driving off in a van, took $1.6 million with them, police
said.
The robbers, according to police, later split up and drove off in two
vehicles, a U-Haul truck and a car. The truck was stopped at a police
roadblock on the New York State Thruway.
Witnesses said that when police stopped the vehicle, and pulled two
suspects from the front, they were surprised by three others who burst
from the rear and opened fire.
The New York Times quoted one bystander who witnessed the shooting of a
local officer, 45-year-old Waverly Brown, known as "Chipper."
"The door swung open and one came out shooting and shot Chipper," he
said.
Another described the shooting of the second officer, Sgt. Edward
O'Grady.
"They shot him in the back -- they didn't have to do that."
The suspects then commandeered cars, throwing out passengers, and
escaped.
Police, however, recovered the stolen money from other vehicles used in
the bank robbery.
There seems to be evidence that the robbery did indeed have political
connotations -- from both sources inside the police and persons familiar
with the radical left. Police and FBI officials said the holdup had led
them to a raid on a bomb factory in East Orange, N.J., that uncovered a
manual on the construction of bombs as well as diagrams of six area
police precincts.
One of the cars used in the robbery attempt, a white Oldsmobile, was
reportedly traced to that apartment. Another car used in the robbery, a
Honda, was reportedly registered to a woman who had been arrested last
month during a clash between police and anti-apartheid demonstrators at
Kennedy Airport.
And a source familiar with the old radical left and once a part of its
workings told The Washington Post that Boudin and Clark were, to the
best of his knowledge, part of a splinter group of the Weathermen that
had decided to stay below ground, rather than give themselves up.
He also said that while Boudin was the better known of the Weathermen,
"Judith Clark is the leader who would have out-ranked Kathy Boudin."
Clark was heavily involved with the Weatherman Central Committee, he
said.
The source said that the Weathermen had apparently split two years ago
over "inversion -- the policy of surfacing and coming up and continuing
the struggle" -- or remaining underground, and that "the schism was also
over the use of violent means, as well as some minor left-wing
ideological fights."
He could not elaborate on "violent means" but said that the Weathermen
had divided into at least two groups.
The "Prairie Fire" group, which advocated surfacing, had included "many
of the names the public associates with the Weathermen," the source
said, such as Bernardine Dohrn, Mark Rudd and Bill Ayers.
Both Boudin and Clark are believed to have belonged to the other main
group, the "May 19th Movement," which takes its name from the birthdates
of Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X.
Boudin is the daughter of prominent attorney Leonard Boudin, who has
represented persons identified with radical causes. Leonard Boudin's New
York office this morning told callers he "has no comment" and "he's
unavailable."
Katherine Boudin had been sought for 11 years in connection with an
explosion that leveled a Greenwich Village town-house. She had been
indicted with Clark in the Chicago "Days of Rage" and, at one time, was
on the FBI's most wanted list.
In Washington, FBI spokesman Bonner said a FBI warrant charging her with
"unlawful interstate flight to avoid prosecution for mob action" had
been dismissed in May, 1979. Cook County, Ill., authorities said today
they are still interested in prosecuting Boudin on aggravated battery
and conspiracy charges stemming from her 1968 Chicago Democratic
National Convention activities.
Whether there are other outstanding charges against Boudin, such as any
state charges pending in New York, could not be determined.
Similarly, little is known at this time about Clark, and whether she was
forced to go underground, or, like some Weather activists, did so in
order not to become involved with grand jury or other police
investigations.
Born in New York City, Clark was 21 when she was indicted in 1970 for
violation of a federal anti-riot law.
One year later the government admitted it had tapped her phone "during
the course of a national security surveillance of a telephone
installation to which she initiated calls or from which calls were
initiated to her." Clark filed a suit against the government in 1978. At
the time of her arrest yesterday, she was reportedly living in
Manhattan.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, Plainclothes officers leads Katherine Boudin into
police station. AP; Picture 2, Body of Brink's guard lies covered on
sidewalk outside Nanuet bank; a handgun used in robbery is under the
truck's bumper. AP; Picture 3, Police roadblock stopped suspects on
freeway; two officers were slain when three persons jumped from truck
and opened fire. UPI
Copyright 1981 The Washington Post
==========================================
10. "Up From the Underground," The New York Times, October 23,
1981, Friday, Late City Final Edition, Section A; Page 30, Column 1;
Editorial Desk, 350 words
* * *
A few months after the 1970 explosion in a Greenwich Village townhouse
that killed three Weathermen, their leader, Bernardine Dohrn, said, "We
became aware that a group of outlaws who are isolated from the youth
communities do not have a sense of what is going on."
Weather Underground, as the group was later called, never did have a
sense of what was going on. Its members went to Cuba to meet the
Vietcong; they went to Algeria to meet the P.L.O.; yet both the black
and women's movements spurned their overtures. They were everywhere and
nowhere -- amateurs of revolution, self-styled urban guerrillas.
Their specialty was bombing, at which they were not adept, as evidenced
by the famous townhouse explosion that killed part of their membership.
Nonetheless, during the years of Vietnam protest, they were responsible
for at least 20 intentional bombings, and several deaths. If their
bombing was clumsy, their thinking was inchoate: to read Weather
Underground's 1974 political statement is to drown in rhetoric. Their
only real skill, in fact, was masterly manipulation of media. Members of
a small, lunatic cell, they won a place in the national consciousness
far out of proportion to their number.
Tuesday, after years of silence, Weather Underground surfaced again.
Katherine Boudin, a fugitive from the townhouse explosion, and Judith
Clark, who served a prison term in connection with the 1969 "Days of
Rage" in Chicago, were captured as they fled the scene of the killing
of two Nyack policemen. The officers had set up a roadblock to halt
bandits who had killed one Brink's guard and wounded two others during a
$1.6 million robbery.
Although their language was invariably grandiloquent, the members of
Weather Underground have never been precise in defining The Enemy.
"Perpetrators of global violence" is a fair sample. The victims,
however, are easily described. Working men, white, black, parents.
Ordinary people.
Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
==========================================
11. "Police Raid Apartments to Gather Evidence on
Killings in Rockland,"
The New York Times, October 23, 1981, Friday, Late City Final
Edition, Section A; Page 1, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk, 1975 words, by
Robert D. McFadden
* * *
Federal agents and the police raided six apartments in New York City and
Westchester County yesterday as new links emerged between radical
activists, black terrorists and the gang that killed two police officers
and a Brink's guard Tuesday in a $1.6 million armored-car holdup in
Rockland County.
Guided by documents found early Wednesday in an East Orange, N.J.,
hideout of the gang, authorities armed with search warrants raided three
apartments in Manhattan and others in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Mount
Vernon, N.Y. They found weapons, ammunition, walkie-talkies, bloody
clothing and literature on radical causes.
In the Bronx apartment, police officials said, the raiders discovered
floor plans for police stations and lists naming specific police
officers as targets for assassination. Similar plans and lists had been
found in the East Orange apartment Wednesday, along with weapons, wigs
and other items for disguises.
In Queens, the owner of one of the gang's getaway cars was arraigned
yesterday on riot and assault charges stemming from a violent protest at
Kennedy International Airport last month against the Springboks, the
South African rugby team, and was held in lieu of $10,000 bail.
The widening investigation uncovered growing indications that a network
of "safe houses" and bomb factories were in the process of being set up
by gang members.
Investigators also said they were looking into the gang's possible
involvement in a series of armored-car robberies and other crimes
ranging from an anti-Springboks bombing in Schenectady last month to the
escape of Joanne Chesimard, a leader of the Black Liberation Army, from
prison in New Jersey in 1979.
In another development, a third of the four captured robbery suspects
was identified as a member of the Weather Under-ground. Two suspects,
Katherine Boudin and Judith A. Clark, had been identified as members of
the terrorist group on Wednesday.
Yesterday, the Rockland County District Attorney, Kenneth Gribetz,
identified a third suspect as David Joseph Gilbert, 37, of Cambridge,
Mass., a former Columbia University student who was listed by Federal
authorities in 1975 as a fugitive member of the Weather Underground.
Mr. Gilbert was at one time wanted by Colorado authorities for arson and
assaulting a peace officer, the authorities said. The disposition of
that case was unclear. As a Columbia University philosophy student in
1965, he was brought up on disciplinary charges by university officials
in connection with an antiwar demonstration.
Mr. Gilbert had carried identification papers listing himself as James
Lester Hackford, 33, of Staten Island, but these papers were found to
belong to a retired New York City policeman.
The second male suspect in the robbery was Samuel Brown, 41. Law
enforcement officials said yesterday that he had a 23-year record of
arrests and convictions for offenses including larceny and possession of
guns and burglar's tools.
Security at the Rockland County Jail in New City, where three of the
suspects were being held on murder and other charges, and at the Nyack
Hospital room of Samuel Brown was strengthened yesterday. As part of the
security precautions, Mr. Gribetz asked a State Supreme Court justice to
hold today's scheduled arraignments at the jail and the hospital,
instead of in a courtroom in Nyack.
Another Getaway Car
Mr. Gribetz said the police had found another of the gang's getaway
cars, a white Oldsmobile that had been abandoned in Pelham, N.Y. It was
said to have been registered to Marilyn Jean Buck, a 34-year-old
fugitive who was sentenced in 1973 to 10 years in jail as a gunrunner
for the Black Liberation Army.
Miss Buck, a former student at the University of California at Berkeley,
was said to be the only white member of the Black Liberation Army. Along
with members of the holdup gang who escaped on Tuesday, Miss Buck was
also being sought by authorities yesterday.
Mr. Gribetz did not specify the Federal charge pending against Miss
Buck, but he said she had been identified as the woman who, in the name
of Nina Lewis, had rented a Bronx apartment that apparently became one
of the gang's hideouts and the East Orange apartment that had become a
bomb factory. The Bronx apartment was one of the sites raided yesterday;
the East Orange apartment was the one raided Wednesday.
The robbery that generated the sprawling investigation un-folded at
midafternoon Tuesday as gunmen killed a Brink's guard, Peter Paige, 49,
and wounded two others at the Nanuet Mall in Clarkstown, and then killed
two Nyack policemen, Sgt. Edward O'Grady, 32, and Officer Waverly Brown,
45, in a shootout at a roadblock in Nyack.
The manhunt for four to eight members of the holdup gang who escaped was
called off yesterday amid fading hopes of finding the fugitives in the
woods and small towns around Nyack and Nanuet. But two additional
weapons used in the holdup were found.
New details, meantime, began to emerge on the recent activities and
whereabouts of Miss Boudin, Miss Clark and other suspects.
A Fugitive Since Explosion
Miss Boudin, who had been a fugitive since the explosion of a bomb
factory in a Greenwich Village town house in 1970, has a 1-year-old baby
boy and, under a false name, has been receiving welfare benefits --
$177.75 every two weeks -- in New York City for the last 20 months,
according to records of the city's Human Resources Administration.
The 38-year-old suspect and her son, Chesa, have been sharing an
apartment at 50 Morningside Drive, near Columbia University, for more
than a year with Rita Jensen, an investigative reporter for The Stamford
(Conn.) Advocate, and her two teen-age children, according to Mrs.
Jensen.
Mrs. Jensen, in an article in The Advocate, was quoted as having said
that she knew Miss Boudin as Lynn Adams and that their life together was
quietly domestic. "She always washed the dishes; I always cleaned up,"
said the 35-year-old reporter.
From time to time, Mrs. Jensen said, Miss Boudin was vis-ited at the
apartment by one of the men who was seized in the holdup. He was the man
who had identified himself as James Hackford and was later identified as
Mr. Gilbert. "I knew him as Lou Wasserman," Mrs. Jensen said after
recognizing his face in a newspaper photograph.
Studied at Columbia
Mrs. Jensen, who graduated from Ohio State University and the Columbia
Graduate School of Journalism, worked for The Paterson Evening News in
New Jersey from 1978 to 1980 and joined The Advocate last January. She
wrote a number of sto-ries on the Black Liberation Army and Joanne
Chesimard.
She said that because she expected to be questioned by the police, she
had retained a lawyer, Martin Stolar. Mr. Stolar, who has represented
numerous political dissenters and defendants in civil liberties cases,
has resisted subpoenas to testify before grand juries investigating the
Black Liberation Army and the whereabouts of fugitives.
Miss Clark, 31, another of the suspects arrested Tuesday, had not
recently been a fugitive but had served time a decade ago on charges
stemming from the so-called "Days of Rage" antiwar protests in Chicago
in 1969. In recent years, she has lived on West 98th Street on
Manhattan's Upper West Side. She was described by neighbors as being the
mother of an infant child.
The Upper West Side has been a haven for radicals moving underground for
years. Miss Boudin lived on Morningside Heights, a half-mile north of
Miss Clark. And Bernardine Dohrn and William Ayres, other former Weather
Underground leaders, had an apartment on the Upper West Side before she
surfaced last year.
Patricia Hearst spent some time in a house on West 90th Street during
her months on the run with the Symbionese Liberation Army. Several
police raids yesterday began to shed additional light on the Rockland
holdup gang's activities. At a suspected gang hideout at an apartment at
2819 Barker Avenue in the Bronx, 50 police officers and agents of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation found automatic weapons, shotgun
ammunition and several walkie-talkies. The police said a copy of
Wednesday's New York Times was found, indicating someone had been there
after the Tuesday holdup.
High on the lists of potential targets found in that apartment and the
one in New Jersey was the Queens Country Criminal Court building in Kew
Gardens, especially the office of District Attorney John Santucci,
according to city officials familiar with the lists.
Also listed for attack were the stationhouses for the 1st, 6th, 13th,
17th and Midtown North Precincts in Manhattan and the 71st and 78th
Precincts in Brooklyn, the officials said. They would not disclose the
names of the policemen who had been under surveillance and possibly
targeted for attack.
Bloody Clothing Found
The members of the new Joint Terrorism Task Force also raided an
apartment at 590 East Third Avenue in Mount Vernon, where they said they
found bloody clothing that might have been left there by gang members
after the shootout.
The authorities would not reveal if they found any pertinent evidence in
the searches of three apartments in Manhattan. . Two of the Manhattan
apartments were at 243 West 97th Street and 201 West 97th Street. The
third Manhattan apartment raided yesterday was at 302 West 12th Street,
not far from the brownstone that blew up in 1970. In still another raid
Wednesday night, the police entered the Brooklyn apartment of Eve Rosahn,
the 30-year-old defendant in the Springboks protest who was arraigned in
Queens yesterday.
In her $275-a-month two-and-a-half-room apartment at 61A South Elliott
Place in the Fort Greene section, the police found literature espousing
radical causes and posters picturing Miss Chesimard.
Miss Rosahn and four other defendants charged in the Springboks case
were represented by Susan Tipograph, a lawyer who has represented
defendants associated with a Puerto Rican terrorist group.
Investigators attempting to draw together the diverse threads of the
case said there were indications that the last vestiges of the Weather
Underground, the radical group born amid the antiwar protests and racial
turbulence of the 1960's, might have joined forces with members of the
Black Liberation Army to form a resurgent radical group.
Series of Robberies
One New York City investigator said the police believed the new radical
alliance had staged a series of robberies in recent months to finance
their activities and had moved to set up a number of "safe houses" and
bomb factories.
The New Jersey state police said they were investigating possible links
between the robbery gang and Miss Chesimard's escape from the State
Correction Institute for Women at Clinton, N.J., on Nov. 2, 1979. Miss
Chesimard, who had been serving a life sentence for the murder of a New
Jersey state trooper, was freed by three heavily armed men who briefly
held two guards.
In Schenectady, Federal investigators said they were looking into a
possible link between the Weather Underground and an explosion on Sept.
22 that rocked the building housing the offices of the Eastern Rugby
Union, which was the chief sponsor of the three-game American tour of
the Springboks.
The team became the target of numerous protests because of South
Africa's policy of racial separation, known as apartheid.
Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
==========================================
12. "You Don't Need A Weatherman...," United Press
International, October 24, 1981, Saturday, AM cycle, Domestic News,
902 words, by Bruce Olson
* * *
The Weather Underground was born in 1969 with a call to arms in a dingy
auditorium just south of the Chicago Loop. Its death is a matter of
debate.
Former members say it ended last December when two leaders, Bernadine
Dohrn and William Ayers, surrendered to authorities.
The bloody emergence of Kathy Boudin, Judy Clark and Jeffrey Carl Jones,
three long-time Weather members, does not mean the group is alive, but
only that a few 1960s radicals remain committed to terrorist action,
underground sources say.
Ms. Boudin, 38, and Ms. Clark, 31, were captured with two men Tuesday in
the $1.6 million armored car robbery in which two police officers and a
Brink's guard were killed. One of the men later was identified as David
J.A. Gilbert, 37, who was listed by the FBI in 1975 as a fugitive
Weather Underground member.
Jones and Eleanor Stein Raskin, a member of a violent off-shoot of that
group, were arrested late Friday in the Bronx. They were not immediately
tied to the armored car heist but were charged with unlawful flight to
avoid prosecution in connection with a 1979 police raid of a bomb
factory in Hoboken, N.J.
Killed by police investigating the robbery late Friday was Sam Smith, a
suspected Black Panther believed to have been in on the Brink's
shootout.
Police said they were investigating possible ties between the pair and
Ms. Boudin, Ms. Clark and the others arrested in the armored car heist.
One former member said Miss Boudin and Miss Clark had been "outside the
group for a long time. They were outside the official structure as early
as 1977."
Sources said they had no knowledge of a new group, the May 19 Coalition,
that police say may include former members of the Weather Underground
and the Black Liberation Army.
"It's a dream we had for a long time, combining black with white," and
ex-member said. "But the Brink's holdup really has nothing much to do
with Weather-politics as they were once upon a time."
"This robbery in New York may indictate [sic] a new uprising,
but's not the Weather Underground," said another former member. "There
hasn't been anything published in a long time and in the last years
there was always the question of what to do politically."
The Weatherman origins lay in a debate within the 25,000-member Students
for a Democratic Society, which began to splinter at the height of its
influence, as early as 1968. At the 7th annual convention of SDS in June
1969 in Chicago, the split sent shock waves that forever changed the
student movement.
Miss Dohrn and then-radical celebrity Mark Rudd presented a mimeographed
paper that began with the Bob Dylan line, "You don't need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows."
The paper called for guerrilla war and resulted in a division among the
1,000 SDS delegates packed into the hall. Two major factions began open
rhetorical warfare: a Progressive Labor Party faction committed to
traditional socialist revolution and another pro-terrorist side which
had largely given up on white workers as a force for change.
Miss Dohrn, the leader of the wing interested in terrorism, convinced
members of the Black Panther Party to stand along the walls with arms
folded while she expelled everyone but "true fighters" from SDS. She
marched out of the hall, with about a third of the delegates following.
The theoretical in-fighting continued through the summer and three
groups formed: those led by Miss Dohrn became the Weather Underground,
those supporting Los Angeles organizer Mike Klonsky eventually formed
the October League, and those led by Berkeley organizer Bob Avakian
became the Revolutionary Union.
In October 1969, Miss Dohrn led her helmeted troops into Chicago for a
spree of rock-throwing and battles with police known as the "Days of
Rage."
The Weatherpeople spent the early 1970s setting bombs, claiming credit
for at least 20 bombings, including explosions at New York City police
headquarters, the U.S. Capitol, the State Department and several
corporate headquarters.
The group split for the last time in 1977, this time over the question
of whether to stay underground or go public with overt political action.
Rudd became the first to surrender.
In 1978, part of the core of those who wanted to stay under-ground was
obliterated when five members were arrested in Houston. They included
Judith Bissell, a long-time leader; Mike Justesen, underground since
1970; Clayton Van Lydegraf, former secretary of the Communist Party in
the state of Washington; Mark Perry, a Seattle radical; and Leslie Ann
Mullin, a member of a splinter called the Prairie Fire Organizing
Committee.
All were convicted for a plot to bomb the office of a California state
senator, served two years and are now out of jail. Van Lydegraf is
reportedly in Los Angeles, but sources say he never rejoined the Weather
Underground.
In the 70s, two Weather publications filtered through left wing book
stores: "Prairie Fire," published from 1974 to 1977, and "Breakthru,"
the journal of the faction that wanted to surface.
Both papers disappeared by 1978 and until last week, the group's only
apparent activity involved quiet surrender on various state and federal
charges.
Just one member of the clandestine organization is still wanted by
police: Silas "Trim" Bissell, Judith Bissell's husband, accused of
bombing an ROTC building at the University of Washington in 1969.
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
13. "You Don't Need A Weatherman...," United Press
International, October 24, 1981, Saturday, BC cycle, Domestic News,
812 words, by Bruce Olson
* * *
The Weather Underground was born in 1969 with a call to arms in a dingy
auditorium just south of the Chicago Loop. Its death is a matter of
debate.
Former members say it ended last December when two leaders, Bernadine
Dohrn and William Ayers, surrendered to authorities.
The bloody emergence of Kathy Boudin and Judy Clark, two long-time
Weather members, does not mean the group is alive, but only that a few
1960s radicals remain committed to terrorist action, underground sources
say.
Miss Boudin, 38, and Miss Clark, 31, were captured with two men Tuesday
in the $1.6 million armored car robbery in which two police officers and
a Brink's guard were killed. One of the men later was identified as
David J.A. Gilbert, 37, who was listed by the FBI in 1975 as a fugitive
Weather Under-ground member.
One former member said Miss Boudin and Miss Clark had been "outside the
group for a long time. They were outside the official structure as early
as 1977."
Sources said they had no knowledge of a new group, the May 19 Coalition,
that police say may include former members of the Weather Underground
and the Black Liberation Army.
"It's a dream we had for a long time, combining black with white," and
ex-member said. "But the Brink's holdup really has nothing much to do
with Weather-politics as they were once upon a time."
"This robbery in New York may indictate [sic] a new uprising,
but's not the Weather Underground," said another former member. "There
hasn't been anything published in a long time and in the last years
there was always the question of what to do politically."
The Weatherman origins lay in a debate within the 25,000-member Students
for a Democratic Society, which began to splinter at the height of its
influence, as early as 1968. At the 7th annual convention of SDS in June
1969 in Chicago, the split sent shock waves that forever changed the
student movement.
Miss Dohrn and then-radical celebrity Mark Rudd presented a mimeographed
paper that began with the Bob Dylan line, "You don't need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows."
The paper called for guerrilla war and resulted in a division among the
1,000 SDS delegates packed into the hall. Two major factions began open
rhetorical warfare: a Progressive Labor Party faction committed to
traditional socialist revolution and another pro-terrorist side which
had largely given up on white workers as a force for change.
Miss Dohrn, the leader of the wing interested in terrorism, convinced
members of the Black Panther Party to stand along the walls with arms
folded while she expelled everyone but "true fighters" from SDS. She
marched out of the hall, with about a third of the delegates following.
The theoretical in-fighting continued through the summer and three
groups formed: those led by Miss Dohrn became the Weather Underground,
those supporting Los Angeles organizer Mike Klonsky eventually formed
the October League, and those led by Berkeley organizer Bob Avakian
became the Revolutionary Union.
In October 1969, Miss Dohrn led her helmeted troops into Chicago for a
spree of rock-throwing and battles with police known as the "Days of
Rage."
The Weatherpeople spent the early 1970s setting bombs, claiming credit
for at least 20 bombings, including explosions at New York City police
headquarters, the U.S. Capitol, the State Department and several
corporate headquarters.
The group split for the last time in 1977, this time over the question
of whether to stay underground or go public with overt political action.
Rudd became the first to surrender.
In 1978, part of the core of those who wanted to stay underground was
obliterated when five members were arrested in Houston. They included
Judith Bissell, a long-time leader; Mike Justesen, underground since
1970; Clayton Van Lydegraf, former secretary of the Communist Party in
the state of Washington; Mark Perry, a Seattle radical; and Leslie Ann
Mullin, a member of a splinter called the Prairie Fire Organizing
Committee.
All were convicted for a plot to bomb the office of a California state
senator, served two years and are now out of jail. Van Lydegraf is
reportedly in Los Angeles, but sources say he never rejoined the Weather
Underground.
In the 70s, two Weather publications filtered through left wing book
stores: "Prairie Fire," published from 1974 to 1977, and "Breakthru,"
the journal of the faction that wanted to surface.
Both papers disappeared by 1978 and until last week, the group's only
apparent activity involved quiet surrender on various state and federal
charges.
Just two members of the clandestine organization are still wanted by
police: Jeff Jones, sought for a Hoboken, N.J., bomb factory explosion
in 1979, and Silas "Trim" Bissell, Judith Bissell's husband, accused of
bombing an ROTC building at the University of Washington in 1969.
ADVANCED-DATE: October 23, 1981, Friday, BC cycle
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
14. "Days of Rage: radical politics and violent
tactics," United Press International, October 24, 1981, Saturday,
AM cycle, Domestic News, 871 words, by Marcella S. Kreiter
* * *
DATELINE: CHICAGO
They came by the hundreds and set up camp in scenic Lincoln Park in
October 1969.
It was a gathering of 800 young people, sitting around bon-fires,
inspiring each other with descriptions of how the world should be.
But the campers were student radicals -- members of the Weatherman
faction of the Students for a Democratic Society -- and their gathering
turned into four days of rock-throwing rampages and pitched battles with
police on the Near North Side and in the Loop.
It became known as the "Days of Rage." It was a kind of be-ginning of
the end of radical student politics.
More than 50 police officers and scores of demonstrators were injured,
and 250 people were arrested.
In the aftermath, the future Cook County sheriff lay crippled and a
dozen student leaders were indicted on state and federal charges -- some
were arrested and jailed; others were forced into a decade of hiding.
Among those indicted were Katherine Boudin and Judith Clark, captured
Tuesday at Nyack, N.Y., in a bungled $1.6-million terrorist-style
armored car robbery that left two police-men and a Brink's guard dead.
Another Weather fugitive, Jeffrey Carl Jones, and Eleanor Stein Raskin,
a member of violent offshoot of that group, were arrested late Friday in
the Bronx. They were not immediately tied to the armored car heist but
were charged with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in connection
with a 1979 police raid of a bomb factory in Hoboken, N.J.
Killed by police investigating the robbery late Friday was Sam Smith, a
suspected Black Panther believed to have been in on the Brink's
shootout.
Police said they were investigating possible ties between the pair and
Ms. Boudin, Ms. Clark and two others arrested in the armored car heist.
Nearly $1.6 million was stolen but later re-covered.
The "Days of Rage" violence began Wednesday, Oct. 8, 1969, and continued
for three more days. Radicals from throughout the nation streamed into
Chicago to protest the Vietnam War and the draft, the Chicago Seven
conspiracy trial and other issues.
The protesters made camp in Lincoln Park, where a year earlier police
and Yippie demonstrators clashed during the Democratic National
Convention. They broke up picnic tables and used them for firewood and
waited for police to try to evict them from the park.
Police just stood watch, waiting for the real trouble to begin.
And it did.
"It was really quiet," recalled UPI photographer James Smestad. "The
kids were all sitting around bonfires, just talking. Nobody was making
any kind of a speech.
"Then, all of a sudden about 50 of them took off like a thundering herd.
They picked up bricks from a demolition site and smashed car windows,
just randomly. They jostled an elderly couple walking down the street.
"When they got to Clark and Division (1 miles south), the police were
lined up across the intersection. They weren't going to let them go any
further south."
That time the crowd dispersed. By Saturday, however, the demonstrators
were fighting mad.
"It was a group that was indeed violent and completely vicious," said
Richard Elrod, then assistant city corporation counsel and now Cook
County sheriff. Elrod suffered a broken neck the final day of the
disturbances and remains paralyzed.
"They were irresponsible revolutionists," he said. "They came to Chicago
for the sole purpose of causing chaos and havoc in the city."
Elrod said little could have been done to prevent the clashes because of
constitutional guarantees against prior restraint -- the crime had to be
committed before the arrests could be made.
To Detective Jim Cunningham, who was injured in the battle with
demonstrators at the federal building, "These people mostly were spoiled
brats.
"They were all college graduates. They had a silver spoon all their
lives. All came from wealthy parents."
"All hell broke loose," said Cunningham, a Korean War veteran. "I didn't
have time to think. It happened so quick. You just react. Basically I
was trying to protect myself and the other officers."
"If they're going to kick a police officer, think what they're going to
do to you. If you weren't one of them, they went after you."
Cunningham, a 14-year police force veteran at the time, filed assault
charges against Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn.
The Weatherman faction, which later became the Weather Underground,
split with the SDS after the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Under
the leadership of Miss Dohrn, a native of Whitefish Bay, Wis., the group
became increasingly more militant -- bomb threats were made, bombs
exploded, bomb factories uncovered by police.
Miss Dohrn and William Ayers, son of a prominent Chicago family,
surrendered to authorities last December after more than a decade in
hiding.
Others indicted included Mark Rudd, Michael Spiegel, Howard Machtinger,
Terry Robbins, Linda Evans, John Jacobs, and Lawrence Weiss.
Sentences for those indicted for the Days of Rage who surrendered ranged
from probation and a $2,000 fine for Rudd to nine months in prison for
Ms. Wilkerson. She is serving the sentence concurrently with her
three-year term for the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse bomb blast that
killed three people
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
15. "The Brink's Job: Blowing The Lid Off The Weather
Underground," The Associated Press, October 24, 1981, Saturday,
AM cycle, Domestic News, 1386 words, by Scott Kraft, Associated Press
Writer
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK
It began as just another Brink's job.
But it blew the lid off the Weather Underground, a group of 1960s
anti-war radicals and 1970s anti-establishment bomb-builders who managed
to elude capture for 10 years.
In the 1960s, they protested the Vietnam War and fled from riot and
assault charges. In the 1970s, they eluded a FBI manhunt and exploded a
bomb in the U.S. Capitol.
When they tripped -- their bomb factory blew up in 1970, killing three
-- they picked themselves back up. They were resilient, tough and
slippery.
But last week the terrorist underground leaders were pushing 40 and
pushing their luck. At their homes were lists of names, police station
floor plans, guns and bomb-making equipment.
This time they made a mistake. And fingerprints, license plate numbers,
search warrants -- the clues that had rarely worked for police before,
began working and working and working.
A week of dogged police effort netted five members of the Weather
Underground, a fugitive Black Panther, and two other men with long
police records. Authorities continued to search New York City and its
suburbs for the remnants of a gang that killed two policemen and a
Brink's guard Tuesday.
Finding the nest of radicals came as a "total surprise to everybody,"
said one federal official.
"They blew their whole (underground) operation," said the official with
the Treasury Department's Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency in New
York. He asked not to be identified.
"Their house of dominoes is falling down. I think before this is all
over we'll solve a whole lot of bank robberies."
The FBI special agent in charge in New York, Kenneth Walton, said the
arrests had strained, if not broken, the back of the Weather
Underground.
"It's got to be in traction," said Kenneth Walton, FBI special agent in
charge in New York.
William Kunstler, an attorney who has agreed to represent Katherine
Boudin, said Friday authorities may use this incident to blame crime
after unsolved crime on radical terrorists, making "it a self-fufilling
prophecy that there is a widespread radical terrorist movement in the
United States."
Figures from the country's radical past -- Katherine Boudin, Judith
Clark and David Gilbert -- are being held on charges in connection with
the death of the Brink's guard and two police officers and the heist of
$1.6 million from an armored truck in Clarkstown, N.Y.
Two others -- Jeffrey Carl Jones, 33, and Eleanor Stein Raskin, 35, --
were arrested in the Bronx early Saturday morning and charged with
unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in New Jersey, where they were
arrested in 1979 on a charge of unlawful possession of explosives.
Police said there was no evidence Jones and Ms. Raskin had anything to
do with the Brink's holdup.
Authorities said all five were members of the May 19 Coalition -- a
recently formed radical group named for the birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and
slain black leader Malcolm X.
The crack in the underground first appeared Tuesday after-noon.
A Brink's armored car pulled up to the Nanuet National Bank at a mall in
Clarkstown. Three men jumped out of a van behind the armored truck and a
fourth sprang from a nearby bench. All opened fire. Peter Paige, a
guard, died instantly. Two other guards were wounded.
Bags containing $1.6 million were grabbed. Five blocks away, the gunmen
abandoned the van and jumped into three waiting vehicles, including
another van.
The crack in the underground widened when the getaway vehicles ran into
a police roadblock.
As officers ordered passengers in the front out, three or four gunmen
leaped from the back and fired automatic weapons. Two officers died and
one was wounded.
Ms. Boudin was arrested at the scene. Ms. Clark, Gilbert, 37, and Samuel
Brown, 41, with a New York City arrest record dating to 1958, were
arrested later after their car crashed with police in pursuit.
Some of the money was found in the van and a car. A third car got away,
but police got its license plate number.
The crack opened further Wednesday when officials traced the license
plates to an East Orange, N.J., apartment where officers discovered
bomb-making materials, floor plans of a half-dozen New York City police
stations, two sawed-off shotguns and several 9mm automatic pistols like
those used in the Brink's holdup.
The apartment belonged to Marilyn Jean Buck, a federal fugitive who has
been described as the only white member of the Black Liberation Army, an
underground group at war with police. She is at large.
Other searches yielded more leads, one of which led to a chase and
shootout in Queens on Friday. Nat Burns, also known as Nathaniel
Williams, a Black Panther and fugitive from 1968 bombing charges, was
arrested. He was wearing a bullet-proof vest.
Samuel Smith, 37, was killed in the exchange of gunfire, police said. He
was wearing a bullet-proof vest dented over a body bruise apparently
suffered in a recent shooting -- perhaps in the Brink's robbery, police
said.
New York City police have been probing connections among radicals, black
terrorists and the robbers of the armored truck. Some police sources
have speculated that the Weather Underground might have forged an
alliance with the militant Black Liberation Army, a faction of the Black
Panthers.
Police Commissioner Robert McGuire said officials "have no hard
information to link the Weather Underground to the Black Liberation
Army."
The Weather Underground originally was known as The Weatherman, after
the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song that went: "You don't need a weatherman
to know which way the wind blows."
The group, a spinoff of the Students for a Democratic Society, led the
bloody "Days of Rage" anti-war demonstration in Chicago in 1969 and many
of its members were indicted but skipped bail.
They claimed responsibility for bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971,
setting an explosion that damaged the office of the California attorney
general in 1974 and other bombings. But in recent years, the group had
fallen silent. It reportedly was split over a plan to abandon sabotage
to concentrate on aboveground politics.
Its members took odd jobs or collected welfare, living in "safe" houses
and using aliases. The frustration of life on the run was evident in
poems Ms. Boudin, Cathlyn Platt Wilkerson and Bernardine Dohrn read on a
radio show in 1975. One poem read:
"Underground is not the right word
It makes it seem too simple
As if there's any easy way to disappear
A place to go beneath the city streets
There is no passage."
Ms. Dohrn, 38, surrendered last year on charges of aggravated battery
and bail jumping in connection with the Days of Rage.
Ms. Wilkerson, who disappeared with Ms. Boudin after the two fled from a
Greenwich Village brownstone explosion in 1970, turned herself in last
year and received a one-to-three year sentence on charges related to the
explosion. Officials said the brownstone was a bomb factory; three
radicals died in the blast.
Mark Rudd surrendered in 1977 after seven years as a fugitive on charges
stemming from the 1968 riots at Columbia University and the Days of
Rage. He got a fine and two years' probation.
The Weather Underground principals apprehended this week:
Katherine Boudin, a magna cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr College and
daughter of civil rights lawyer Leonard Boudin. She skipped bail after
the Days of Rage. Recently, she lived with her year-old baby on
Manhattan's Upper West Side, collecting $354 a month in welfare.
Judith Clark, 31, gave birth to a girl last spring. She was arrested by
the FBI in 1970 and served time in prison on charges stemming from the
Chicago protests. Her conviction was overturned because the FBI used
burglaries, mail openings and illegal wiretaps. She also lived on the
Upper West Side.
David J. Gilbert graduated from Columbia College in 1966 with a degree
in philosophy and attended the New School for Social Research. He was a
longtime member of the SDS and the Weather Underground.
Jeffrey Jones, 33, was a national officer of SDS and leader of the
Weather Underground who dropped from sight in 1970, the FBI said. He was
wanted on charges of making bombs and inciting riots.
Eleanor Stein Raskin, who attended Columbia Law School, was charged with
Jones of unlawful possession of explosives in New Jersey in 1979.
Copyright 1981 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
==========================================
16. "Days of Rage: The beginning of the end ...,"
United Press International, October 24, 1981, Saturday, BC cycle,
Domestic News, 796 words, by Marcella S. Kreiter
* * *
DATELINE: CHICAGO
They came by the hundreds and set up camp in scenic Lincoln Park in
October 1969.
From the outside, it was a gathering of 800 young people, sitting around
bonfires, inspiring each other with descriptions of how the world should
be.
But the campers were student radicals -- members of the Weatherman
faction of the Students for a Democratic Society -- and their gathering
turned into four days of rock-throwing ram-pages and pitched battles
with police on the Near North Side and in the Loop.
It became known as the "Days of Rage." For all practical purposes it
served as the beginning of the end of radical student politics.
More than 50 police officers and scores of demonstrators were injured
and 250 people were arrested.
In the aftermath, the future Cook County sheriff lay crippled and a
dozen student leaders were indicted on state and federal charges -- some
were arrested and jailed; others were forced into a decade of hiding.
Among those indicted were Katherine Boudin and Judith Clark who were
captured Tuesday at Nyack, N.Y., in a bungled $1.6 million
terrorist-style armored car robbery that left two policemen and a
Brink's guard dead.
The "Days of Rage" violence began Wednesday, Oct. 8, 1969, and continued
for three more days. Radicals from throughout the nation streamed into
Chicago to protest the Vietnam War and the draft, the Chicago Seven
conspiracy trial and other issues.
The protesters made camp in Lincoln Park, where a year earlier police
and Yippie demonstrators clashed during the Democratic National
Convention. They broke up picnic tables and used them for firewood and
waited for police to try to evict them from the park.
But police just stood watch, waiting for the real trouble to begin.
And it did.
"It was really quiet," recalled UPI photographer James Smestad. "The
kids were all sitting around bonfires, just talking. Nobody was making
any kind of a speech.
"Then, all of a sudden about 50 of them took off like a thundering herd.
They picked up bricks from a demolition site and smashed car windows,
just randomly. They jostled an elderly couple walking down the street.
"When they got to Clark and Division (1 miles south), the police were
lined up across the intersection. They weren't going to let them go any
further south."
That time the crowd dispersed. By Saturday, however, the demonstrators
were fighting mad.
"It was a group that was indeed violent and completely vicious," said
Richard Elrod, then assistant city corporation counsel and now Cook
County sheriff. Elrod suffered a broken neck the final day of the
disturbances and remains paralyzed.
"They were irresponsible revolutionists," he said. "They came to Chicago
for the sole purpose of causing chaos and havoc in the city."
Elrod said little could have been done to prevent the clashes because of
constitutional guarantees against prior restraint -- the crime had to be
committed before the arrests could be made.
To Detective Jim Cunningham, who was injured in the battle with
demonstrators at the federal building, "These people mostly were spoiled
brats.
"They were all college graduates. They had a silver spoon all their
lives. All came from wealthy parents."
"All hell broke loose," said Cunningham, a Korean War veteran. "I didn't
have time to think. It happened so quick. You just react. Basically I
was trying to protect myself and the other officers."
"If they're going to kick a police officer, think what they're going to
do to you. If you weren't one of them, they went after you."
Cunningham, a 14-year police force veteran at the time, filed assault
charges against Weatherman leader Bernardine Dohrn.
The Weatherman faction, which later became the Weather Underground,
split with the SDS after the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Under
the leadership of Miss Dohrn, a native of Whitefish Bay, Wis., the group
became increasingly more militant -- bomb threats were made, bombs
exploded, bomb factories uncovered by police.
Miss Dohrn and William Ayers, son of a prominent Chicago family,
surrendered to authorities last December after more than a decade in
hiding.
Others indicted included Mark Rudd, Cathlyn Wilkerson, Michael Spiegel,
Jeffrey Jones, Howard Machtinger, Terry Robbins, Linda Evans, John
Jacobs, and Lawrence Weiss.
Of those, only Jones remains unaccounted for. He and his common-law
wife, Eleanor Raskin, also are wanted in a 1979 bomb explosion in
Hoboken, N.J.
Sentences for those indicted for the Days of Rage who surrendered ranged
from probation and a $2,000 fine for Rudd to nine months in prison for
Ms. Wilkerson. She is serving the sentence concurrently with her
three-year term for the 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse bomb blast that
killed three people.
ADVANCED-DATE: October 23, 1981, Friday, BC cycle
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
17. "Brink's robbery hints at radical black-white
link," United Press International, October 24, 1981, Saturday, BC
cycle, Domestic News, 1455 words, by Dan Collins
* * *
DATELINE: NEW YORK
When Byrn Mawr College honors graduate Katherine Boudin resurfaced after
11 years as a rebel on the run, it was in a hail of bullets police fear
may be a chilling new link between white radicals and black militants.
The slim remnants of the white middle class Weather Underground and the
cop-killing Black Liberation Army both trace their roots back to the
Vietnam War protests and racial turbulence of the 1960s.
The possibility the groups have become enmeshed in a resurgent
revolutionary movement loomed Tuesday when a gang of blacks and whites
ambushed a Brink's armored car at a shopping mall near Nyack, N.Y.,
killing a guard and wounding two others. Two policemen were killed in a
shootout as the robbers tried to escape with $1.6 million.
Four people were arrested and up to six suspects, all described as
blacks, were sought.
Three of those arrested were white Weather Underground members,
including Miss Boudin, 38, who had been a fugitive since a 1970
Greenwich Village bomb factory blast that killed three other radicals.
The fourth suspect was Samuel Brown, 41, a black with a long arrest
record.
Attorney General William French Smith's initial reaction was: "It's a
hangover from the past. I don't see any resurgence of terrorism."
But the vicious terrorist-style ambush spawned a fullscale investigation
by the FBI and local and state police in at least two states. In tracing
the getaway vehicles, police and federal agents mounted raids at a
string of suspected safe houses and apartments in New York and New
Jersey.
They uncovered explosives, weapons and BLA and Weather Underground
revolutionary literature. They also found floor plans for six New York
City police stations and a "hit-list" of officers.
Many officials saw a possible joining of forces between the remnants of
the Weather Underground and the BLA, a group with a deep hatred of a
system its members see symbolized by police officers.
Investigators suspect the Nyack gang may have been involved in a series
of crimes, ranging from bank robberies to the 1979 prison escape of
Joanne Chesimard, the "Soul of the BLA" who was serving a life sentence
for killing a New Jersey state trooper, to the bombing of a Schenectady,
N.Y., rugby club last month during a visit by South Africa's Springbok
team.
For Miss Boudin, the downhill path to her present dilemma as a murder
and holdup suspect began in the revolutionary rhetoric and ideas of the
1960s.
Her father is Leonard Boudin, a prominent New York civil rights attorney
who has defended many radicals. She studied in private schools and went
to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia, graduating magna cum laude in
1965 with a degree in Russian literature. She spent her senior year in
the Soviet Union.
Miss Boudin first became involved in the civil rights movement in 1963
and after Bryn Mawr moved to Cleveland, where she worked as a community
organizer for the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society.
Through the years she moved up in the SDS leadership and was arrested at
the 1968 National Democratic Convention in Chicago for throwing a stink
bomb into the lobby of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
In 1969, the student movement began to split over ideological issues
such as the advocacy of violence or non-violence. And the issue of
women's rights began gaining new momentum.
The most vocal faction to emerge from the disarray in movement was the
Weathermen, who took their name from a line in a song by Bob Dylan -
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
The Weathermen exploded into the nation's consciousness and history in
October 1969 when a gathering at Chicago's Lincoln Park turned into four
days of rock-throwing rampages and pitched battles with police that
became known as the "Days of Rage."
Miss Boudin was among the 250 people arrested. So were such well-known
student radicals as Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dohrn and Cathlyn Wilkerson.
After the "Days of Rage" the Weathermen went underground, declaring: "We
are against everything that's good and decent in honky America. We will
loot, burn and destroy. We are the incubation of your mother's
nightmares."
The growing influence of militant women was signaled when the group
changed its name to the Weatherpeople and then finally the Weather
Underground because Weathermen had sexist connotations.
As an underground revolutionary movement, it engaged in a campaign of
bombing, claiming responsibility for a blasts at such targets as banks,
police stations, the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and the State Department in
1975.
It was a bomb blast that made Miss Boudin a fugitive and sent her into
the underground of the nation's radical movement. On March, 6, 1970, an
explosion ripped through a posh townhouse in Greenwich Village. Police
said the house had been converted into a radical bomb factory and in the
rubble they found the remains of three Weathermen -- two men and a
women.
Two women dashed naked from the rubble, got clothing from a neighbor and
disappeared in a car. They were Miss Boudin and Miss Wilkerson, whose
parents owned the town-house.
Miss Wilkerson, now 36, surrendered July 8, 1980, after decade on run
and is serving a three-year sentence. Miss Boudin had not been seen
until her arrest and little is yet known of her life as a fugitive.
She is the mother of a 1-year-old son and for 21 months had shared an
apartment near Columbia University with a reporter for a Connecticut
newspaper who was unaware of her roommate's past. Miss Boudin's father
took custody of her son, Chesa.
Miss Boudin collected welfare since February 1980 under the name Lydia
Adams. Her most recent payments covering her and her child were for
$177.75 every two weeks.
Through her roommate's account of life with Miss Boudin, it is clear the
fugitive kept her rebel contacts. David Gilbert, long-time Weather
Underground member who also was seized in the Nyack robbery, was a
frequent visitor.
Details of Miss Boudin's arrest, however, indicate she may not be as
fervent a supporter of revolutionary violence she once was.
"Please don't kill me!" she repeated again and again to Michael Koch, an
off-duty New York City corrections officer who captured her as she ran
from a roadblock. "Please don't shoot me! They shot them, I didn't."
It is not yet clear how Miss Boudin and the other Weather Underground
members are linked with the BLA. But a radical lawyer who has defended
black and white revolutionaries said: "The white radicals would do
anything to achieve identification with the people they regard as the
most militant and revolutionary."
Before the Nyack attack, only one white was linked to the BLA -- Marilyn
Buck, 34, daughter of an Austin, Texas, minister, and listed on New York
Police intelligence files as a member of the Weather Underground. A car
used in the Nyack robbery and a safe apartment in East Orange, N.J.,
were traced to Miss Buck, leading police to list her as an accomplice.
But, it would be a marriage of fragments if the revolutionary alliance
is proved.
Most known BLA members have been killed or jailed in what can only be
described as a war with law enforcement agencies, especially the New
York City Police Department, that began in the early 1970s.
And, Kirkpatrick Sale, an author regarded as a foremost authority on the
old Students for a Democratic Society, estimated that only six or seven
of the 50 or so members of the Weathermen movement are still in hiding.
The BLA was a 1970 offshoot of the Black Panther Party. Little is known
of the BLA beyond a series of bank robberies punctuated by the slaying
of police officers.
In May 1971, two New York City police officers were machine gunned and
seriously wounded and two other officers were slain in an ambush. The
BLA, previously unknown to New York police, claimed responsibility.
By 1974, police believed the group had been smashed with 16 BLA members
killed or jailed in the three-year war. Five New York City police
officers, three of them black, were killed and 19 others wounded.
But late in 1974, three BLA members shot and seriously wounded a police
officer in a bank robbery in New Haven, Conn. They were quickly captured
and said they had not worn masks in the holdup to show the BLA was still
alive.
BLA gunmen struck again in April, killing a New York City police officer
and wounding another in a hail of bullets fired into a patrol car on a
Queens street. One suspect has been arrested.
A lawyer who has defended BLA members said:
"They believe the capitalist system must be crushed through the use of
force and violence and they believe the police are the cutting edge of
that system."
The Weather Underground thought the same way.
ADVANCED-DATE: October 23, 1981, Friday, BC cycle
Copyright 1981 U.P.I.
==========================================
18. "Major News in Summary; A Bloody Holdup and a
Secret Life," The New York Times, October 25, 1981, Sunday, Late
City Final Edition, Section 4; Page 1, Column 3; Week in Review Desk,
531 words
* * *
From time to time and without much fuss, surviving members of the
Weather Underground have turned themselves in, tired of living secret
lives, perhaps, or wondering which way the wind was blowing. Last week
Katherine Boudin, perhaps the group's most prominent fugitive, was also
taken into custody, but only after a brutal, bungled bank holdup that
left three dead and enough clues for police to race to hide-outs used by
radicals in the New York region.
Police said Miss Boudin was among those in a red van that pulled up
behind a Brink's armored car at the Nanuet National Bank in Rockland
County at 3:55 P.M. Tuesday. Opening fire with automatic weapons, the
robbers killed one guard, wounded two others and made off with
$1,589,000. Minutes later, two officers in nearby Nyack were killed and
a third wounded in another shootout after one of the getaway vehicles
was halted at a roadblock. Four gang members were captured the money was
recovered; an unknown number of assailants escaped.
The capture of Miss Boudin ended an underground career that began in
1970, when she fled from a ''bomb factory'' in a Greenwich Village
townhouse after an explosion killed three other radicals. The daughter
of a prominent left-wing attorney and an honors graduate of Bryn Mawr,
she had been living quietly, under the pseudonym Lynn Adams, with her
one-year-old son in an apartment house near Columbia University. But
like others who had moved from activist to militant to terrorist, she
came to measure her life with crude bombs planted to punish those deemed
guilty of ''global violence.''
Eventually, many became disenchanted with the underground and the
violence. Mark Rudd, the Columbia leader, surrendered in 1977. Cathlyn
P. Wilkerson, another 11th Street survivor, and Bernardine Dohrn turned
themselves in last year. But a die-hard faction stayed in hiding, and as
police last week traced vehicles abandoned by the gang to ''safe
houses,'' there was ample evidence that more than one holdup was planned
-- and perhaps that others had already been carried out.
Investigators recovered weapons, ammunition, walkie-talkies, floor plans
for several Manhattan police precincts, a ''hit list'' of police
officers and evidence they said linked the gang to the Black Liberation
Army. Shell casings from the scene were said to be similar to ones found
in other armored-car robberies.
Three days after the shootings in Rockland County more violence exploded
in Queens. After a detective spotted a car with a license plate linked
to one of the hide-outs, a 20-minute chase ended in another shooting;
police killed one of the gunmen and were questioning another, who they
described as a fugitive Black Panther. Hours later, two other fugitive
radicals were seized at an apartment in the Bronx.
''It's a broad-scale investigation,'' said the New York City Police
Commissioner, Robert J. McGuire, as Federal agents stepped up efforts
across the country against what they said was a broad alliance of
violent radical groups.
Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
==========================================
19. "Last of Radical Leaders Eluded Police 11 Years,"
The New York Times, October 25, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final
Edition, Section 1; Part 1; Page 38, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk, 1050
words, by Paul L. Montgomery
* * *
Jeffrey Carl Jones, arrested Friday night in his Bronx apartment as he
watched the World Series with his wife and 4-year-old son, was the last
identified leader of the Weather Underground to escape capture or
surrender in the 11-year search by the authorities to round up members
of the terrorist group.
Mr. Jones, 34, and his common-law wife, Eleanor Stein Raskin, 35, had
been associated with the Weathermen from the group's inception in the
summer of 1969 and went underground with it the next year. Mr. Jones was
a signer of several statements in which the Weathermen took
responsibility for bombings of public buildings, and had been sought by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation for most of the last 11 years.
Police interest in the couple was renewed in August 1979, when they were
indicted in Hudson County, N.J., for unlawful possession of explosives
in connection with a raid on a radicals' bomb factory in Hoboken. They
apparently fled to New York soon afterward, once again becoming Federal
fugitives.
Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin were ordered held in $200,000 cash bond at the
Metropolitan Correction Center in Manhattan yesterday pending
extradition proceedings to New Jersey. Stacey J. Moritz, the assistant
United States attorney handling the case, told Federal Magistrate Kent
Sinclair Jr. that the proceedings should begin tomorrow.
Employed as a Laborer
At the bail hearing, Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin held hands and smiled
frequently at each other. Mr. Jones, asked by a re-porter about his
callused hands, said he had been working as a laborer, but would not
elaborate.
An F.B.I. spokesman said that, at the moment, there was no demonstrable
connection between the couple and the arrests of three members of the
Weather Underground at the Brink's robbery in Nanuet on Tuesday.
However, it was known that both Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin had been
associated in the past with Katherine Boudin, one of those arrested in
the robbery, though authorities did not know if there had been any
contact since 1977.
he lawyer for the couple, Morton Stavis of Hoboken, said at the bail
hearing that he had been in negotiation with Hudson County authorities
''for some time'' for the surrender of his clients on the explosives
charges. ''To the best of my knowledge, the F.B.I. has been aware of
these negotiations,'' Mr. Stavis said. However, Kenneth Walton of the
F.B.I. New York office, who is in charge of the antiterrorist task
force, said he was not aware of any plea bargaining.
''Perhaps some effort is going to be made to escalate this out of all
proportion,'' Mr. Stavis told the court. ''But this case is unconnected
and disconnected with the recent series of events.''
Couple Lived in the Bronx
The couple had lived in apartment 6C at 2965 Decatur Avenue in the Bronx
under the names John and Sally Maynard. Mr. Jones, who once gave his
hometown as Sylmar, Calif., after an arrest in Chicago in 1969, had been
associated since his teens with the radical wing of Students for a
Democratic Society. which became the Weathermen. In 1967 he went to
Cambodia with Cathlyn P. Wilkerson and Steve Halliwell of S.D.S. to meet
with the Vietcong, and organized antiwar demonstrations in Chicago that
summer.
Miss Raskin grew up in New York and attended Barnard College and
Columbia Law School. She is believed to be divorced from her former
husband, who was named Raskin. Her father, Arthur Stein, was an
economist in the New Deal and her mother, Annie, was active in social
causes such as civil rights. Her mother died earlier this year and her
father had died some time previously.
Mr. Jones was one of 11 members who prepared an S.D.S. manifesto calling
for armed violence in the summer of 1969. The cover of the manifesto had
a silhouette of a guerrilla fighter and a line from Bob Dylan's 1965
song ''Subterranean Homesick Blues'' -- ''You don't need a weatherman to
know which way the wind blows.'' The faction advocating violence and
alliance with armed groups such as the Black Panthers came to be called
the Weathermen after the manifesto cover; the name was later changed to
Weatherpeople and then Weather Underground when female members
protested.
Appeared in Underground Movie
In 1969, Miss Raskin was a co-author with Miss Boudin of ''The Bust
Book,'' a manual for radicals about what to do after arrest. According
to most estimates, there were about 300 active members of the Weather
movement in late 1969 and about 40 who went underground early the next
year to start a terrorist campaign. Mr. Jones had been listed as
interorganizational secretary when the group was founded and later was
known as one of the five-member central committee, along with Miss
Boudin, Miss Wilkerson, Bernardine Dohrn and William B. Ayers.
In 1975 Mr. Jones appeared in an underground movie with the four other
leaders, with their faces turned from the camera to avoid
identification. Mr. Jones recounted the experiences of ''the group'' in
the bombing of the United States Capitol on March 1, 1971. He said the
bomb, placed in a storage room behind the Senate barbershop, had failed
to go off the first time, so that the participants had to return the
next day to retrigger it. A caller alerted the Capitol police a
half-hour before the blast, so that there were no injuries; damage was
estimated at $100,000.
Beginning about 1975, when the Weathermen set off the last of more than
20 bombs in public places, there was a debate among the remaining
members about whether to surface and resume legal political activity or
to stay in the terrorist underground. Mr. Jones was believed to have
favored what the group called ''inversion'' or surfacing while Miss
Boudin was believed to support continued armed violence.
The next trace of Mr. Jones and Miss Raskin was in Hobo-ken in 1979,
when police raided an apartment where materials for making bombs were
found. The apartment was traced to the couple, who were indicted in
absentia.
Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
==========================================
20. "Return of the Weatherman," Newsweek, November 2, 1981,
United States Edition, National Affairs; Pg. 30, 2761 Words, Peter
McGrath with Susan Agrest and Eric Gelman in New York, Ray Saywhill in
Nyack, and Frank Gibney Jr. and George Hackett in Stamford
* * *
Michael Koch was driving to a friend's gas station one afternoon last
week when he noticed a roadblock at a Nyack entrance to the New York
Thruway. Suddenly, gunshots rang out and Koch, an off-duty corrections
officer at Rikers Island prison, slammed his car to a stop, pulled out
his .38-caliber revolver and sprinted toward the action on the
embankment above. Black men -- he couldn't say how many -- were spraying
the area with automatic weapons. Koch saw one policeman fall in the
deadly hail, another dive for cover. Then a white woman appeared,
running toward the thruway, and Koch leveled his gun at her. "Don't!" he
shouted, and she stopped, raising her hands. As he began to frisk her,
she struggled momentarily, then gave in and began to shout: "I didn't
shoot him, he did." Koch marched her back to the shooting scene, bloody
in the aftermath: the gunmen were escaping, but officer Waverly Brown
lay dead, one lung half out of his shredded chest, and Sgt. Edward
O'Grady was mortally wounded.
Without knowing it, Michael Koch had captured one of America's
best-known former fugitives: Katherine Boudin, a veteran of the
long-dormant Weather Underground.* Boudin was last seen eleven years ago
fleeing naked from the ruins of the Greenwich Village town house she and
her comrades were using for a bomb factory. The discovery of her true
identity, hours later, set minds spinning and law-enforcement officials
scrambling: was the radical left back in business and ready for blood?
* The Weather Underground was a derivative of the Weatherman, a radical
group spawned in the late 1960s. The name was taken from a line in an
antiwar song by Bob Dylan called "Subterranean Homesick Blues." The
line: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
The answer seemed to be a qualified yes. A wave of police searched
apartments in New York and New Jersey and turned up suggestions that the
Nyack shoot-out might have been the result of a larger plan gone awry --
a plan possibly linking the Weather Underground with an urban-guerrilla
group called the Black Liberation Army (BLA) in a new biracial alliance.
As other suspects were seized, the names alone recalled the turbulence
of the late 1960s and early 1970s: in addition to Boudin, they included
Judith A. Clark, a Weather Underground leader also arrested in the Nyack
incident; Nathaniel Burns, a fugitive Black Panther sought since 1968 on
bombing charges, arrested last week after a high-speed chase in Queens,
and Jeffrey Jones and his girlfriend, Eleanor Raskin, prominent members
of the Weather Underground wanted in connection with the 1979 discovery
of a bomb factory in New Jersey. Tantalizingly out of reach of the
police was another figure, Joanne Chesimard, said to be "the soul" of
the BLA and eagerly sought since her 1979 escape from prison, where she
was serving a life sentence for murdering a New Jersey state trooper
(page 33). Chesimard's connection to the shoot-out in Nyack was unclear,
but law-enforcement officials had a hunch she was involved and on the
move, just a step or two ahead of them. One thing was clear: lawmen had
on their hands one of the biggest cases of its kind since the house on
West 11th Street exploded and Kathy Boudin vanished.
The shoot-out began as an armored-car robbery in semirural Rockland
County, N.Y., about 20 miles outside Manhattan, at a shopping mall in
the hamlet of Nanuet. A Brink's truck was being loaded with the day's
receipts from the branch of a local bank. Just as guard Joseph Trombino
reached the truck with the bags of cash, two men jumped out of a passing
van and opened fire with shotguns. A third man emerged from the mall and
began shooting a 9-mm automatic. Brink's guard Peter Paige fell dead
instantly, and Trombino took a bullet in the shoulder. The gunmen
grabbed the money-six bags containing $1.6 million--and roared a way in
the van. Half a mile up the road, at another shopping plaza, two getaway
vehicles were waiting--a tan Honda and a small U-Haul truck. The robbers
split up and sped off. But suspicious onlookers called police--and 5
miles away the robbers came to the roadblock at the thruway.
Crash: As detective Arthur Keenan of the Nyack police later recounted in
court, the police pulled the U-Haul over. Boudin and the driver --a
white man -- got out, offering no resistance, and Keenan searched the
cab. Finding nothing, he tried the rear door, and found it locked. He
was walking back to his fellow officers when he heard a sound--and
turned to see several black men springing from the truck, their
automatic rifles already spewing bullets. After out-shooting the police,
the men commandeered cars from passing motorists and escaped; the Honda
went past the roadblock untouched. Later, police said, the escaping
criminals ditched the commandeered cars, switching to a white Oldsmobile
and a maroon Ford. The two cars left the Nyack area at high speed -- but
some onlookers remembered the license-plate numbers. Police picked up
the trail of the Honda as it turned into the placid town of Nyack -- and
in a high-speed chase, the driver lost control of the car, crashing into
a concrete wall. The driver, a bearded white man who called himself
James Hackford, was actually a Weather Underground member named David J.
Gilbert. The other passengers were Clark, who identified herself
correctly, and a black man who said he was Solomon Bouines, later
identified as Samuel Brown, an ex-convict with an arrest record
stretching back to 1958 but with no known political affiliations.
As police and FBI agents broadened their investigations, the cast of
characters grew. The tan Honda was registered to Eve Rosahn, an
anti-apartheid activist who had been arrested in September in a violent
protest against the American tour of the South African Springboks rugby
team. More important, the registration for the Oldsmobile, found
abandoned in Pelham, N.Y., led police to an apartment in East Orange,
N.J., rented by a "Nina Lewis."
The [search led to the discovery] of firearms and ammunition,
bomb-making equipment -- and apparent plans for police assassinations
and demolition of precinct stations in New York City.
That search also produced an address in the Bronx -- another apartment
rented by "Lewis," where police found more guns and ammunition,
walkie-talkies and a Viet Cong flag. At that point they began to suspect
that the two apartments might be part of a network of bomb factories and
hide-outs for use by a fusion of two underground groups. The missing
link between the two was "Nina Lewis," who police say is actually
Marilyn Jean Buck, a veteran activist described as the BLA's
"quartermaster" and its only white member. Authorities suspect her of
driving the getaway car for Chesimard's jailbreak, and she is now being
sought as the driver of the white Oldsmobile at the Nyack shoot-out.
Gun Battle: Soon there was another possible link to the BLA -- and it,
too, followed a bloody shoot-out. Driving through Queens, detective
Daniel Kelly of the New York City police spotted a gray Chrysler bearing
New Jersey tag 573 LDU -- the same license plate seen on the maroon Ford
escaping from Nyack. The Ford had been spotted two days earlier outside
an apartment in Mt. Vernon, N.Y., where police found blood-stained
clothing, but the car had disappeared before it could be searched. In
Queens, Kelly and other officers gave chase, eventually cornering the
two occupants of the Chrysler in a bleak industrial area in the shadows
of Shea Stadium. In the ensuing gun battle, one of the men, Samuel
Smith, was killed and the other -- Nathaniel Burns -- was captured. Both
men were former Black Panthers. Were the two involved in the Brink's
robbery and murder? Police weren't sure, but some curious facts came
out: Burns's African name is Sekou Odinga, and a man of that name was at
the Clinton women's prison in New Jersey the day Joanne Chesimard
escaped. Burns's wife, Naomi Odinga, is known to belong to the BLA.
The bizarre case took another twist late Friday night, when evidence
uncovered in the earlier searches led FBI agents to an apartment house
in the Bronx. Two agents showed the building superintendent, Patrick
Dineen, and his wife, Margaret, pictures of John and Sarah Maynard. The
Dineens verified that the couple lived there. The agents then told the
Dineens that the Maynards were really members of the Weather Underground
-- and left, returning later with a third agent to call the Maynard
apartment from the Dineens' phone. "Mr. Maynard, is your wife there?"
one agent asked. Maynard apparently said she was. "Remain calm, we don't
want anyone to get hurt," he said, explaining that the FBI had a dozen
agents sealing off every possible exit. "Come to the door with your
hands on your head." The Maynards did -- and the FBI moved in to arrest
them.
In fact, "John and Sarah Maynard" were Jeffrey Jones and Eleanor Raskin,
key figures in the Weather Underground at the height of its activities
during the early 1970s, when it claimed responsibility for a number of
bombings -- including an explosion at the U.S. Capitol. The two had been
sought since 1979, when a raid on an apartment in Hoboken, N.J.,
uncovered what local police described as a bomb factory filled with
enough explosives and detonation devices to blow the roof off the
building. There was no immediate evidence tying either Jones or Raskin
to the Nyack shoot-out, but both may have belonged to the "May 19
Coalition," a group said to include Boudin and Clark and several black
radicals. (The coalition adopted May 19 because it was the birth date of
both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X.) At the weekend it was not clear whether
the May 19 Coalition was actually the fusion group of BLA and the
Weather Underground that police were investigating.
In a sense, the capture of Jones and Raskin, following the arrests of
Boudin and Clark, could mark the end of the Weather Underground. All
four had remained at the core of the group from the time it was first
founded in 1969 as the Weatherman group, a militant, violence-prone
offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They were
undeterred when the group was forced underground in 1970 by the
revelation of its Greenwich Village bomb factory -- and they survived
the tensions between male and female members that undermined the group
in the mid-1970s, forcing the change of name to the sexually neutral
"Weather Underground." When the group broke apart in 1976, some members
urged a return to an aboveground life of community and labor
organization; others continued to push guerrilla tactics, and Boudin,
Clark, Jones and Raskin apparently tried to make the center hold.
If all are convicted as charged, the leadership of the group would be
seriously eroded. Most of the other early leaders have already gone
public, some to move on to quieter lives. Mark Rudd, who first achieved
notoriety during the Columbia University riots of 1968, came out of
hiding in 1977, was fined $2,000 and given two years' probation for his
part in the Weatherman's "Days of Rage" rampage in Chicago in 1969; he
now lives in New Mexico, where he teaches at the Albuquerque
Technical-Vocational Institute. Cathlyn Wilkerson, like Boudin a
survivor of the town-house explosion that killed three Weathermen,
surrendered in July 1980 on charges stemming from that incident and is
serving a three-year term in a New York state prison. And last December
the group's two central figures finally emerged. Bernardine Dohrn and
William Ayers had spent several years living in Manhattan under
fictitious names. Dohrn was fined and put on probation for the Days of
Rage; charges against Ayers had been dropped years earlier.
'Angry': For holdouts like Boudin, life underground has been
increasingly lonely. For the past several years, she has been living
under assumed names in New York City, most recently sharing an apartment
with another woman, Rita Jensen, and her two teenage children. The
38-year-old Boudin herself has a child, a 1-year-old son named Chesa,
possibly fathered by her co-defendant David Gilbert. Although she is the
daughter of Leonard Boudin, one of the country's most prominent
civil-rights lawyers, Kathy Boudin has lived on welfare since early
1980. Residents of her building describe her as "very hard looking, an
angry looking woman," but a friend who knew her as "Lynn Adams" takes a
kinder view: "I always thought she was a tragic figure, someone who got
stuck in lost causes and never got her act together." He recalls once
bringing her child a present, a balloon in the shape of a frog. Boudin
was thrilled: "She said very few people knew about her and her baby, and
she wondered why she was so isolated,"
Jensen, 35, added to the confusion last week by revealing that even
though she is an investigative reporter with a reputation for
thoroughness, she lived with "Lynn Adams" for several years without
suspecting a thing. "I couldn't believe it," she said in an interview in
her newspaper, the Stamford (Conn.) Advocate. "A gun in our house would
be intolerable. " Despite her disclaimer, some were skeptical, including
present and former newspaper colleagues. "Rita was so intelligent . . .
there is no way she wouldn't have known who Boudin was," said a reporter
for the Paterson (N. J.) News, where Jensen had worked earlier. The
reporter also recalled Jensen once saying she would be spending
Thanksgiving "with my roommate, Kathy," but no one else NEWSWEEK
questioned reported such an incident. Her own newspaper's doubts about
her story were clear in the lead paragraph of an article published the
day after her interview; it said that Jensen had known "Lynn Adams" for
seven or eight years, a report Jensen then denied. One other intriguing
name has arisen in relation to Rita Jensen: several Paterson colleagues
report that on her desk she kept some sort of picture or poster of
Joanne Chesimard of the BLA.
The other arrested Weather Underground members seem to have had a
somewhat more normal life. Judy Clark, 31, was not even a fugitive,
having served a few months in jail in 1970 for taking part in the Days
of Rage, before her conviction was overturned on the ground that the
evidence had been gathered by illegal surveillance. Since then she has
apparently been living in Manhattan, most recently with two other women
and her infant daughter in a rentstruck building on the city's scruffy
upper West Side, holding down temporary jobs.
David Gilbert, wanted in Colorado for arson and assault on a police
officer, has been living in New York and working as a furniture mover
under the alias "Lou Wasserman." Jeffrey Jones and Eleanor Raskin were
living quietly in the Bronx, proud parents of a 3or 4-year-old son,
Timmy. Their neighbors found them polite if aloof, but thought it odd
that the "Maynards" had a steady stream of visitors at all hours of the
day and night. What one FBI agent said of Boudin applied just as well to
any of them: "She could do just about anything in New York and not be
noticed."
'Honkies': At the weekend, with the dragnet broadening and many leads
left to pursue, a number of important questions remained about the
events that began in Nanuet. Was a hostile foreign country like Cuba
somehow involved, as some, including the Wall Street Journal,
speculated? From the beginning the Weathermen were attracted to the
Cuban revolution, and many of them visited Cuba -- usually as part of
the sugar-cane-cutting venceremos ("We shall conquer") brigade. But the
FBI said last week it had no evidence of current links between the Cuban
Government and American radicals. Besides, says Carl Oglesby, a former
SDS president and an insightful historian of the New Left, the young
Americans in Cuba always received more exhortation than actual training
in anything: "They were told 'You're just a bunch of toughtalking
honkies. You talk a big revolution, but that means guns, bombs,
underground organization'. . . They stole their hearts away -- not
their minds, but their hearts."
A bigger question was whether the robbery-murder was part of a larger
blackwhite conspiracy. FBI deputy assistant director Kenneth Walton said
he didn't doubt that "there is an association." But the FBI didn't know
whether the association was a full-bore conspiracy against public
institutions and private property -- or a temporary marriage of
convenience by two aging, shrinking groups. Investigators were pushing
ahead; meanwhile, Rockland County buried its dead and seven jailed
people stared at a future aboveground that was likely to be no better
than the past underneath.
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, Boudin under arrest in Nanuet: 'I didn't shoot him',
AP; Picture 2, Nathaniel Burns in custody: a link to the Brink's affair?
UPI; Picture 3, Death in the afternoon: A bloody autumn battle outside
New York City, UPI; Pictures 4 and 5, Gilbert, Clark under arrest: A
larger conspiracy gone awry? AP photos; Picture 6, Smith lies dead after
Queens chase: Second act? Michael Lipack -- New York Daily News; Picture
7, Buck: The BLA 'quartermaster'; Picture 8, Above-ground: Boudin with
Viet Cong flag in '69, UPI; Picture 9, Wreckage of the 1970 explosion on
Eleventh Street, UPI
Copyright 1981 Newsweek
==========================================
21.
"Jones Pleads Guilty to
Bomb Charge, Faces Chicago Charge," The
Associated Press, November 5, 1981, Thursday, PM cycle, Domestic
News, 426 words, by Ruth Bonapace, Associated Press Writer
* * *
DATELINE: JERSEY CITY, N.J.
A prosecutor says he agreed to a plea bargain with Weather Underground
member Jeffrey C. Jones because evidence in the bombing case was too
weak to assure a conviction if it went to trial.
Jones, 34, pleaded guilty Wednesday to manufacturing a bomb. In return,
the state dropped charges against him and his common-law wife of
possession of a bomb and intent to use a bomb illegally.
Hudson County Prosecutor Harold J. Ruvoldt Jr. said Wednesday that the
charges against Jones, who had been living in hiding for years before
his arrest, were based largely on circumstantial evidence.
"Proving intent is very difficult. A jury could only infer it," Ruvoldt
said.
Jones was scheduled to appear in Chicago criminal court to-day to face
charges of assaulting a police officer during a political demonstration
in 1968.
Jones was arrested Oct. 23 after police uncovered evidence of his
whereabouts during an investigation of a Brink's truck robbery and
murders of a Brink's guard and two policemen in Rockland County, N.Y.,
about 25 miles north of Manhattan. Three other members of the Weather
Underground are among the suspects in the robbery, but authorities say
Jones isn't linked to the case.
Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Gaulkin freed Jones on $10,000 cash bail
Wednesday and ordered him to return to New Jersey Dec. 17 for
sentencing. Jones faces up to 18 months in prison and a $7,500 fine.
At the time of sentencing, an indictment against Eleanor Stein Raskin,
Jones' common-law wife, is to be dismissed.
Among the half-dozen friends and supporters who watched from the court
gallery as Jones submitted his plea were Ms. Raskin, former Weather
Underground leader Bernadine Dohrn, and Jones' parents.
Earlier, when Ms. Raskin came to the gallery and told the group about
the pending agreement, Ms. Dohrn clutched her arm and said, "That's so
good. Maybe we will have a nice Thanksgiving after all."
Jones and Ms. Raskin, 35, were charged two years ago with making pipe
bombs in their Hoboken apartment. Fire officials allegedly found
marijuana plants on the fire escape and a sub-sequent search by police
turned up a pocket watch, wires, detonators, pipes, rubber gloves and
two cans of gunpowder.
The couple's attorney, Morton Stavis, said his clients were arrested in
the "wave of hysteria" following the Brink's robbery.
There was nothing there tying them up with Brink's," Stavis said. "The
FBI said they were only investigating a connection. We were in
plea-bargaining before Brink's and this is just taking up where we left
off."
Copyright 1981 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
==========================================
22 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
November 22, 1981, Sunday, Late City Final Edi-tion
THE SEEDS OF TERROR
SECTION: Section 6; Page 35, Column 1; Magazine Desk
LENGTH: 6671 words
Lucinda Franks, a freelance writer and former Times re-porter, covered
the antiwar movement and won the l971 Pulit-zer Prize for national
reporting for a series written with Thomas Powers for United Press
International.
By Lucinda Franks
It is a warm August night in Ann Arbor, Mich., in l970. The house I have
come to visit looks like so many other houses built for the returning
heros of World War II: a rambling split-level, with a flagstone path
that leads to the front door. Beyond that door, however, the lighting is
dim, mattresses are scattered about on the dusty floor. The smells are
reminiscent of a bazaar: overripe fruit, marijuana, baby formula,
gasoline from freshly mixed Molotov cocktails that are lined up on the
bookshelves like soda pop in a grocery.
Men, women and children wander about the rooms as aim-lessly as house
cats. They eat when hungry, sleep when tired. On this night, however,
two of the men have a purpose. They have backed me so close against the
wall that I can count the whiskers in their beards. To my right and to
my left is a photo gallery of F.B.I. agents and policemen across whose
faces have been scrawled: ''Off the pigs. ... Mash the pigs. ... Stick
the pigs.''
This suburban house is the commune of a radical organiza-tion known as
the White Panthers. It also happens to be an oc-casional hideout for
fugitive Weathermen, self-proclaimed revolutionaries who had their
beginnings in the student move-ment of the l960's. At age 23, I am
considered sympathetic enough to gain entrance to the house, but I am
also a reporter and it is unclear whether I'll be found politically pure
enough to leave. If you are not part of the solution, they like to say,
you are part of the problem. They search my briefcase. They fire
questions at me, one after another. In the flickering candlelight, I
watch their shadows moving across the ceiling like gunmen stealing
through an alley.
There were no guns in those days, of course. They would come later.
There were the bombs, however - crude, amateurish devices - and just
five months before my visit to the house in Ann Arbor, one of them had
gone off by mistake in a Green-wich Village townhouse, killing the three
Weathermen who had been making them. I had come to the White Panther
house in quest of the story of one of those casualties, Diana Oughton.
My interest was personal as well as journalistic: Diana had come from
the same kind of Middle Western background I had and had believed many
of the same things I did. Yet in the end, her goal had been to destroy
everything we were both brought up to love and value.
At age 28, Diana succeeded in destroying only herself. But one of her
comrades, a woman who, like Diana, had been an honor student at Bryn
Mawr College, escaped from the rubble of that townhouse to continue what
she had begun. Her name was Kathy Boudin, and a month ago, in Nyack,
N.Y., she was arrested for armed robbery and the murder of two
policeman, one of them black, and a Brink's guard. Arrested also were
Ju-dith Clark and David Gilbert, Weatherman fugitives who were thought
to have given up their revolutionary war; instead, they had joined
forces with black guerrillas to wage a new campaign of terror.
After the townhouse explosion, I spent six weeks tracing the life of
Diana Oughton, spending time with her family and duck-ing in and out of
her revolutionary underground like a fugitive myself. Since then, I have
continued periodically to meet with sources close to the Weathermen and
to write about the evolu-tion of the movement whose history came to such
a cataclysmic end in the sleepy village of Nyack.
The underground back in l970 was not so much a place as a state of mind.
The term encompassed everyone - fugitive and nonfugitive - who believed
that a ''New Nation'' was being born and the revolution was coming. They
stood apart, as if at the edge of a highlands lake where only two kinds
of folk, the Peo-ple and the Pigs, existed and ''Amerika,'' the
embodiment of evil, rose up and haunted their lives like some Loch Ness
mon-ster. Most, in the passage of time, gave up this antivision, but
some, like Kathy Boudin, did not.
She and the other white radicals involved in the Nyack mas-sacre
traveled down a long spiral: from idealistic students to peaceful
protestors to rioters trashing the streets to revolution-ary cadres bent
on shedding their ''white-skin privilege'' to fugi-tives planting bombs
in empty buildings to women and men ac-cused of assasinating the very
''people'' they said they were fighting for.
Their odyssey is a very American one where numerous ele-ments - guilt,
rage, idealism, delusion - come into play like characters in an classic
tragedy. And like all tragedies, it has its roots in the past.
A windmill that you can see from miles away guides you to the estate of
Jim and Jane Oughton in the tiny Illinois town of Dwight. The driveway
takes you past woodlands full of deer and exotic trees. This is a family
as American as the 2,000 acres of corn-fields which they have owned for
generations. One of Diana's ancestors founded the Boy Scouts of America;
another built the first institute to treat alcoholism as a disease. The
Oughtons paved the village streets, built the waterworks and furnished
land for the schools and the cemetary.
Jim Oughton, a liberal Republican and a former Illinois leg-islator,
wanders from room to room looking for clues to the mystery of who his
oldest daughter really was, who she had really been. His wife keeps
seeing Diana stalking the halls, waving her hands and saying, ''It's the
only way, Mummy; we've got to bring the war home.''
Since her death five months before this summer evening in l970, they
have not had the heart to touch her room and it re-mains filled with the
mobiles and painted desk of her child-hood. Photographs of her seem to
be all over the house. Diana, the child, sitting proudly on a tractor
with her father: ''She was always a farmer at heart, like me.'' Diana,
with long blond hair, giggling on the couch with her nanny, Ruthie:
''When her friend from across the tracks had to be sent away because her
family couldn't feed her, she cried for a week. 'Why do we have to be so
rich, Ruthie?' she asked.'' Diana, home from Bryn Mawr, in suede skirt
and sandals. ''Sending her there was the worst mis-take of my life,''
says her father. ''She wouldn't go to deb par-ties. She went Bohemian.''
Diana, home from Guatemala, where she slept on a dirt floor, worked with
peasants and finally came to believe that American aid was going into
the pockets of the rich, who kept the poor poorer. ''When she came back,
she gave away her fancy clothes and took some old ones from the attic.
The fun was gone out of her,'' says Ruthie. Diana home for her final
Christmas, her toothbrush in a paper bag. ''Her arms were no thicker
than her wrists and she didn't have presents for any-one,'' says her
mother. Diana, in her last picture, a mugshot, hair shorn, a blank look
in her eyes. Fingerprints taken at the same time at a Chicago police
station were the only thing that could identify her remains in the
Greenwich Village townhouse.
We are sitting around the dining table, eating the first sweet corn of
the season. I have come to Dwight to find answers from the Oughtons, but
it is they who want answers from me. ''You remind me of Diana,'' says
Jim Oughton. ''If you were she, sit-ting here two or three years ago, we
could talk about anything - Communism, the war, poverty. I was proud of
her idealism. But near the end, she just wouldn't talk to me anymore.
Why was that, do you think? She wouldn't come home for very long and
when she did, she would bring a coterie of radical hairy friends to
protect her. Let the old Diana laugh and she would suddenly close up.
Her friends would counter my theories, if they lis-tened to them at all,
with a sarcastic 'Oh, wow, man.' They sur-rounded themselves with an
invisible barrier. She loved us deeply, but her revolution said we were
her greatest enemy. What is this revolution? Does anyone know?''
I was born in a small town not far away called Kankakee, and a close
mutual friend, Jean Alice Small, a local newspaper publisher, had
brought me together with the Oughtons. Al-though I had never known
Diana, we had gone to similar East-ern colleges and had followed the
same path, common to our generation, from civil-rights advocates to
participants in the anti-Vietnam war movement. My last year of high
school had seen the assassination of President Kennedy, and my last year
at college, the gunning down of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
In anger, I left the country. While I was making my way as an expatriate
reporter for U.P.I., Diana was taking up clubs in the streets of
Chicago. I could explain to Jim Oughton the frus-tration we experienced
over our inability to end the war, the shame we felt at being labeled
imperialists by our European peers, but I was unable to explain to him
what made his daugh-ter take that final step from idealistic reformer to
violent and implacable foe.
One month before Diana's death, Jean Alice Small had paid a visit to
Jane Oughton. ''We have lost our daughter,'' Jane said, sitting ramrod
straight. Jean Alice volunteered to invite Diana over for a talk, if
Jane thought it might help. ''Sure, she'll come over to your house,''
Jane said, ''to blow it up.''
On a quiet street in Greenwich Village, Jean and Leonard Boudin live in
a townhouse that is warm, comfortable and clut-tered with mementos from
trips abroad. Jean is a poet, and Leo-nard, a civil libertarian and
devoted constitutional lawyer who defended more targets of Joe
McCarthy's witch hunt than any other member of the bar. Their home has
always been a salon for leftist intellectuals, and their daughter,
Kathy, grew up im-mersed in their ideas. She also frequently saw the
inability of her father's beloved law to help the victims of injustice.
In her junior year at Bryn Mawr, her parents received a col-lect call
from the Chester, Pa., jail, where she had been incar-cerated for
demonstrating against conditions at a local black school. Jean was
furious at her for neglecting her studies and for acting upon her
parents beliefs at the expense of her own well-being. In response to
criticism from her fellow students at Bryn Mawr, who said she had
brought disgrace on the college, she replied in the school paper: ''If
desired ends cannot be achieved within the law ... then new methods must
be adopted.'' About this same time, she told her father that she
wouldn't be going to law school after college.
Diana was a year older than Kathy and the two girls were never good
friends at college. Her junior year, Diana went to Munich, where she
encountered anti-Americanism for the first time. Kathy went to Moscow
for her senior year, and wrote af-terward that although she found Soviet
society repressive, it made her realize that the American system was no
better, be-cause freedom of speech and the press could not rid the
society of racism and imperialism.
Following graduation, their routes were startlingly similar. After her
two years in Guatemala, Diana taught in a Federal lit-eracy program in
Philadelphia; her apartment contained only a bed and a table, and her
cupboards were generally bare, save for the caviar and other delicacies
sent by her mother.
Kathy worked in a Cleveland slum with welfare mothers; when Jean Boudin
visited her, she shuddered at the roaches and rats. Both Diana and Kathy
soon came to the conclusion that their efforts in community service were
being stymied by gov-ernment bureaucracy. Diana was particularly bitter
over her failure to get a Federal grant to continue the experimental
un-structured children's school she had founded with her boyfriend, Bill
Ayers, in Ann Arbor. Ironically, it was the black parents who killed the
grant; they wanted their kids to learn to read and write, just like
whites. In l969, both Kathy and Diana, by then close comrades, went to
Cuba as part of a Students for a De-mocratic Society (S.D.S.)
delegation. And both came back starry-eyed about Castro and his
educational reforms.
Cuba had been a shaping force in Kathy's life for some time. She had
gone there in 1961, during her freshman year, and chose to stay with
Cuban students rather than with her father, who happened to be in Havana
representing Castro's new Gov-ernment. In an underground film made about
the Weathermen, Kathy described how she watched a parade celebrating the
Cu-ban revolution. Suddenly, she realized that, along with the crowd,
she was ''cheering for tanks and guns, which was some-thing completely
opposite to what I had been brought up to do.'' Her Cuban friend saw her
eyes fill up with tears and told her that it was her country which made
them have such a parade. ''Three months later, the Bay of Pigs invasion
occurred,'' she said, ''and I understood what he meant.''
White-skin privilege. Rich bitches. Spoiled kids. Bourgeois liberals.
The young radicals of the Vietnam era set out to prove that such phrases
did not apply to them. Not all had come from rich homes. Some were
middle- and even lower-middle-class. But all had the illusion of great -
and shameful -advantage. Once, when Kathy and Diana visited a married
school chum in a comfortable but simple apartment in Chicago, Kathy -
whose father did too much pro bono work ever to get rich -looked around
aghast: ''The only people I know who live like this,'' she said, ''are
friends of my parents.'' The notions of morality and social
responsibility that came out of the more radical segments of the
civil-rights movement dictated that if you were not black, poor, hungry
and homeless, your conscience should be bur-dened.
As important to the development of the Weathermen as their economic
backgrounds were the political environments which nurtured them. Many of
their parents were leftists or at least liberals. Children need to
surpass their parents. Diana could not become richer than her father,
but she could become poorer - and purer. Kathy, who grew cynical about
the law, had to go one step farther than her radical father; she had to
find a more powerful - and forbidden - way to fight injustice.
The news of the antiwar riots at the 1968 Democratic Na-tional
Convention were splashed in red across the London newspapers. In the
Fleet Street U.P.I. office, we all imagined that wide-scale roundups and
curfews were imminent. The Brit-ish, as down on America as the rest of
the world in those days, portrayed the American police as storm troopers
bent on extin-guishing an entire generation. I remember thinking
guiltily that I should have been there. I was a member of S.D.S.; I had
helped organize a Vietnam teach-in at Vassar; I should have been there
in Chicago along with my peers, putting my head in the path of a
nightstick.
Over the next year, the S.D.S. slowly disintegrated. All those bloodied
heads, the arrests and indictments and trials, had not ended the war,
and a more militant group bent on making an impact by whatever means
took over the organization. June 1969 saw the birth of the Weatherman
(the name was taken from the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song: ''You don't
need a weath-erman to know which way the wind blows''). Its 25,000-word
manifesto declared that white radicals would bring about a worldwide
revolution by fighting in the streets of the ''Mother Country.''
The organization, which initially claimed some 400 mem-bers, committed
acts of ''revolutionary violence'' across the na-tion. Weathermen tried
to impress and recruit working-class youths by going into drive-in
hamburger joints and picking fights with police; they burst into schools
and broke up classes, yelling: ''Jailbreak!'' A delegation that went to
Cuba that July met with representatives of the Vietnamese National
Liberation Front, who advised them to build a street-fighting guerrilla
force.
Within a very short time, that is exactly what they did. Sepa-rating
into collectives of 10 to 20 persons each, they attempted to create what
they called a ''Red Army.'' One Weatherman would later tell me that in
order to rid the members of their bourgeois habits, the collectives
forced couples to separate, re-quired homosexuality, drugtaking and
round-the-clock sessions of self-criticism. One time, they skinned and
ate an alley cat. My contact, thin, trembling and glassyeyed, said that
the houses were full of dirty dishes, rancid food and stinking toilets.
Often rising at dawn, they would practice karate, train at rifle clubs,
and enact scenarios to work out how they would grapple with police and
where they would kick them. Part of the day was de-voted to the study of
radical literature, from the anarchist Kro-potkin to Mao to Che to
Malcolm X. Their communes were of-ten rented houses, which they
redesigned by fencing off back yards, putting chicken wire over the
windows, blacking panes and padlocking doors. They cut themselves off
from family and friends, and gave all their money to a common fund which
was used to purchase shields, helmets, and weapons. The money the
Boudins sent to Kathy never put shoes on her feet or new strings on her
guitar. The dividend checks from Diana's share of the Oughton farm also
went to finance the revolution. The gaso-line credit card her father had
given her was used to fill the tank of many a getaway car.
In October l969, their basic training complete, some 200 Weathermen
descended on Chicago for what they named the four ''Days of Rage.''
Wearing helmets and brandishing chains and pipes, they traveled through
the Loop and Gold Coast ar-eas, indiscriminantly smashing windshields
and store windows and beating up passers-by. About 70 members of a
women's mi-litia marched into Grant Park; Kathy Boudin, her hair cropped
and face pressed into an expression worthy of Joan of Arc, car-ried the
Viet Cong flag on a heavy pole. Diana, gritting her teeth, charged
through police lines and was immediately over-powered. They were both
hustled into police vans with several others, and the rest of the women,
some of them crying, were escorted to a nearby subway station.
Later that day, Jim Oughton picked up his attorney and had his chauffeur
drive immediately to the Chicago jail where Diana was being held in
$5,000 bail. He paid it and then tried gently to coax her home. But
Diana, who seemed subdued and resigned, asked to be driven instead to a
church in Evanston, where all the Weathermen were staying. When she got
out of the car, her friends rushed over and crowded around her and she
did not look back at her father.
Desperate not to lose his daughter completely, Jim Oughton never failed
to come through for her. He was always there with more money, shelter
and support when she needed it. Leonard Boudin went even farther; he
openly fought on Kathy's behalf. He defended the documentary-movie
director Emile de Anto-nio, who had secretly filmed the fugitive
Weathermen, includ-ing Kathy, and who was refusing to cooperate with
Government investigators trying to locate the fugitives. He tried to
help Cathy Wilkerson, one of the Weatherman fugitives, when she recently
surrendered. And when his daugther was arrested after the Nyack murders,
he was there by her side. Other former radical fugitives, such as Jane
Alpert, who conspired to bomb eight New York Government and corporate
buildings in l970, have told of similarly helpful parents.
Having suffered the hardships of war and depression them-selves, parents
in the l960's catered to their children's every whim. This indulgence
the Weathermen treated with contempt and wanted to obliterate in their
quest to become true revolu-tionaries. Ironically, it may have been the
one thing that al-lowed them to continue being revolutionaries long
after there was any possibility of revolution. They lacked a good
healthy fear of life, having received few of its blows. Sheltered and
pro-tected for so long, they felt invincible. Even when they went
underground, as much as they liked to deny it, they felt they could
always go back.
If the Days of Rage were meant to convince the world that the Weathermen
were not summertime soldiers but serious war-riors, it had just the
opposite effect. The Black Panther leader Fred Hampton called them ''adventuristic,
masochistic and Cus-teristic.'' It is ironic that, two months later, the
Weathermen convened a ''War Council'' in Flint, Mich., and covered the
walls with red and black posters of Hampton, who had by then been shot
dead by police. They were determined to plug them-selves into the black
revolution, whether the black revolution wanted them or not.
''All white babies are pigs,'' one Weatherman shouted during the
council, in which some 400 people crowded into a large hall hung with
signs reading ''Piece (that is, guns) now.'' Bernardine Dohrn, who later
took control of the organization when it went underground, made a speech
accusing the left of being scared ''honkies'' for not burning down
Chicago when Hampton was killed, and urging her audience to take up arms
and be ''a fight-ing force alongside the blacks.'' The Weathermen were
to be-come as savage as Charles Manson, who massacred Sharon Tate and
her friends in her Beverly Hills home. Dohrn said: ''Dig it, first they
killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then
they even shoved a fork into a vic-tim's stomach. Wild!''
These words, which sounded so powerfully and evilly sick then, today
seem only pathetic - like the child in a temper tan-trum who tries to
think of the worst possible names to call his mother. The talk of using
guns in armed struggle was then no more than rhetoric. What lurked
behind the words was far more menacing, however, and prepared the ground
for the events in Nyack 11 years later. It was not just a revolution
from the in-side out the Weathermen wanted, but one from the outside in.
They were the white-pig babies, the seed that the white estab-lishment
had planted in the soil of ''Amerika,'' and they wanted to dig it up and
cast it to the wind. It was themselves as indi-viduals that they wanted
to destroy.
After the Flint War Council in December, the Weather Bu-reau,
recognizing that their lack of widespread popularity boded ill for
building a mass movement, decided to form a secret guerrilla army
immediately. They split up into affinity groups of four or five and
worked at a manic pitch to assemble and construct bombs. Only about 75
were chosen for this mission, and the rest were purged, or dropped out
of their own accord. The organization obliterated what was left of S.D.S.,
which had mobilized thousands to protest the war through the 1960's, in
the same spirit as they wiped out their pasts. A contingent shredded and
burned all the records at S.D.S. headquarters in Chicago; there were to
be no groups in the future who would rival their own way of doing
things.
The New York cell contained two Weather leaders, Kathy Boudin and
Cathlyn Wilkerson, as well as Diana, and two other active Weathermen,
Terry Robbins and Ted Gold, and was lo-cated at the West 11th Street
home of Cathlyn Wilkerson's fa-ther, who was away at the time. After
firebombing the home of the judge in the conspiracy trial of the Black
Panther 21 - a group of militant Black Panthers charged with bombing a
long list of targets including department stores and police stations -
the Weatherman cell decided more dramtic and damaging ac-tion was
needed. On March 2, one of the Weathermen pur-chased two 50-pound cases
of dynamite in New Hampshire for a planned random bombing of buildings
at Columbia Univer-sity, the site of student uprisings in the spring of
1968. The 11th Street cell members debated whether to use antipersonnel
bombs and the appropriateness of the proposed target. Kathy Boudin
reportedly favored it. Diana had doubts. Arguments went on day and
night, sleep was lost and nerves were frayed. Finally, the militants won
out, but by the time they did every-one was so exhausted - and still so
inexperienced with explo-sives - that they had not properly equipped
what was once Mr. Wilkerson's work room, and now was a bomb factory.
On Monday, March 2, 1970, the same day the dynamite was bought, Diana
called her sister, Carol, and asked, in a voice tinged with urgency, if
the family would support her no matter what happened. Two days later,
the sister received a packet containing Diana's address book, farm
documents, correspon-dence and anything else that could identify her. On
Friday, Diana, reportedly heavy-hearted and shaky, went down to the
cellar to put together the wire, clock, batteries and dynamite that,
just before noon, would explode and kill her.
Cathlyn Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin, on the floors above, scrambled out
of the townhouse that was collapsing around them. They were practically
naked; their clothes blasted to shreds. They ran down the street to the
house of a neighbor, who let them wash and change. That night, when Jean
Boudin arrived home, Kathy was standing in the kitchen. For almost a
year, she had come in and out of the house like a phantom, and whenever
she showed up, her parents would try to talk to her, to re-establish
some kind of rapport. Jean began chattering about a fire on West 11th
Street that she had passed that afternoon, about the all the fire
engines and about how angry it make her that they rushed in force to the
townhouse of some rich person while letting tenements in the ghettos
burn away. Kathy didn't reply. Jean finally went to bed. And that was
the last time, until several weeks ago, that she saw her daughter.
After the explosion, the Weathermen went on the lam. They
''demilitarized'' their units, and reappraised their tactics. Kathy
Boudin was reportedly removed for a time from the leadership, and a more
moderate strategy -emphasizing the symbolic bombing of empty buildings
-was adopted. Three months later, following a warning, the New York City
Police Headquarters on Centre Street was bombed. No one was injured.
Although their photographs hung in post offices around the country, they
boasted that they ''moved freely in and out of every city and youth
scene in the country.'' They derided their parents for saying that ''the
revolution was a game for us'' and they swore they would never go home.
How did so many of them evade capture for more than a decade? They
developed what one called ''a new pair of eyes and ears.'' They dyed
their hair, wore colored contact lenses, al-tered driver's licenses or
other I.D.'s. Once they assumed an alias, they always used it to refer
to one another. They set up a network of urban safe houses and rural
farm communes and moved from one to the other. Contact with one another,
friends and relatives was made through post-office boxes, and some-times
telephone answering services. But the pay-phone system of America was
their most trusted accomplice. At prearranged times, they would call
each other from different booths in dif-ferent cities; they charged the
calls to false or stolen credit-card numbers; they would never let a
phone ring too long or use the same one too many times. Their rendezvous
were right out of a spy novel: Buses were taken to the end of the line;
subways then doubled them back; then two or three different taxi rides
landed them a mile or more from the meeting place. They never returned
to a place where they had been when above ground.
Although the Cuban mission in New York acted as a liaison (a few
Weathermen were known to have gone to Cuba), by far the greatest asset
of the Weather Underground was located up on the surface. Poets,
artists, lawyers of the far left, the monied radical chic, the legions
of yippies, S.D.S.'ers and sympathizers formed a web of overground
support that was always good for instant cash, instant havens and
instant message drops. Deserter organizations in Canada also helped with
border crossings and bogus identification papers.
When I returned to the United States in 1970, it was not the same
country I had abandoned two years before. A ''New Na-tion'' really did
seem to be forming within the old. Its inhabi-tants actually looked
different, for the over-30's did not yet wear jeans and long hair. There
were whole neighborhoods that belonged only to them, in the same way I
had seen the Falls Road in Belfast belong to the I.R.A. There were
alternative newspapers, people's parks, free health centers, and
agitprop theaters. In Chicago, I saw notices warning against the ''Red
Squad'': ''Agent, blue eyes, blue Cortina, black hair to shoul-ders,''
or ''Pig posing as writer, red beard, calls everyone 'friend,' often
seen around Armitage Street.'' After asking questions about the
Weathermen for a few days, I half expected to see my own name and
description pinned to brick. Once I ''passed,'' however - as I had done
at the White Panther house - I was trusted by one and all. It was
exhilarating. This ''underground'' network that existed right out in the
open provided a sense of hope and power that is hard to describe. It
seemed that some kind of historic change was in the air.
As I continued to scribble notes about Diana Oughton, I kept hearing the
words that she had said to a professional friend who shared her
political views: ''But if you feel that way, don't you think you have a
duty to act on it?'' White-skin privilege. I had it too. Like many other
young people in those days, I felt un-easy about building a career,
about living like a normal privi-leged person in normal privileged
times, while others were dodging the draft and throwing blood on the
Pentagon and get-ting arrested to protest a war that was decimating our
genera-tion. I was letting others put their lives on the line for my be-liefs.
Out of these frustrations the romantic fantasy of Weather-man was born.
With the Vietnam War getting bigger and blood-ier, the presence of an
outlaw people's army was a source of ca-tharsis. Its tactics might have
been widely condemned on the left, but its exploits conjured up the
tales of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. In September l970, the Weathermen
arranged the escape of Timothy Leary, the LSD guru, from a California
prison where he was serving a term for possession of marijuana. Any
group that could do that had the adulation of the youth cul-ture. (A
knowledgeable underground source now says that the Weathermen charged
$20,000 for the favor, a fact that, had it been known then, might have
slightly sullied the Weathermen's image.) The fact that they could make
a small part of the Penta-gon and the Capitol building crumble under
their dynamite, gave new meaning to the same old antiwar slogans. They
were the band and banner that kept the movement from retreating from the
battlefield.
By 1974, however, the Weathermen demonstrated that they were fast losing
touch with the real world: 25,000 copies of a book-length document
called Prairie Fire, actually printed with gloved hands to avoid
fingerprints, were released from the un-derground and it was without
doubt one of the most boring po-litical manifestoes ever written. The
war was finally ending, Richard Nixon was being booted out, and the last
thing anyone wanted to read was a paean to black terrorism combined with
a tired lecture on dialectical materialism.
That same year, one Weather Underground fugitive, Jane Alpert, gave
herself up, and in the days while she was waiting to be sentenced, she
chose me, by this time a reporter for The Times, to speak with. She told
me of her travels underground and of how Weathermen fugitives lived
joyless, determined lives, existing on yogurt and endless political
debate, spending the night here and there in sleeping bags.
In the spring of 1975, I received a manila envelope stamped with the
return address of a company in New York I had never heard of. Assuming
it was junk mail, I almost discarded it when I noticed it was a magazine
called Osawatomie - very professionally printed by none other than the
Weather Under-ground. Like other selected members of the media who
received issues of the bimonthly publication, I always tore up the enve-lopes
in case of a visit from the F.B.I. The magazine claimed that the Weather
Underground had carried out a total of 25 bombings since the beginning
of the year, some of them ''in support of Black Liberation,'' and
revealed that Weather fugi-tives had been surfacing in disguise. One
cell, for instance, claimed to have infiltrated the meetings of ROAR,
(an acronym for Restore Our Alienated Rights) a rascist antibusing cabal
in Boston. The magazine also contained poetry, short stories and
articles written on the lam.
But after 1975, the organization took credit for no more bombings, and
the magazine stopped coming. The last official word from it came in May
1976, when Weathermen startled everyone by walking across movie screens
in theaters all over the country. Filmed in a safe house in Los Angeles,
Emile de Antonio's documentary, ''Underground,'' featured a conversation
with Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn, Cathlyn Wilkerson, Bill Ayers and
Jeff Jones. (Jones was recently charged in conection with the bombing of
a factory in Hoboken, N.J.) They were shot through a gauzy scrim or from
behind, so that the effect was a collage of titilating fragments:
Bernardine's graying hair, her thin, veined hands pouring a pot of
steaming tea, Jones's floppy hat, Kathy Boudin's hunched blue back. They
spoke so gently and tentatively that you might have thought they were
the local P.T.A. -until they said they were as committed as ever to
revolution through violence. In one mov-ing part, Kathy Boudin talked
about being inside the townhouse explosion: ''... the rumble of it, it's
that kind of time that can't be counted on a clock ... that seems to go
on forever. And you have a chance to see your whole life in that moment,
and also the lives of your friends.''
Some two and a half years ago, the Weather Underground reportedly broke
into two camps: the Prairie Fire collective, which favored resurfacing
(most of the charges against the group had been dismissed because
Federal agents used illegal methods, such as wiretapping, to obtain
them), and the May 19th Coalition, which wanted to become part of a
black terrorist army. The former is said to have included Bernardine
Dohrn and Bill Ayers, and the latter, Kathy Boudin and Judith Clark. A
pact was made at the time prohibiting any Weathermen from publicly
speaking about the split - or about anything else con-nected with the
underground. And so far no one has. Since then, several have
surrendered: Cathy Wilkerson, now serving three years for possession of
the dynamite that caused the townhouse explosion; Bernardine Dohrn, who
was fined on local Chicago riot charges and put on three-year probation,
and Bill Ayers, against whom charges had been dropped but who had been
liv-ing with Bernardine Dohrn and their two small children in Manhattan
under an assumed name.
Friends of Bernardine Dohrn and Cathlyn Wilkerson say the children that
they had borne underground were a deciding fac-tor in their surfacing.
Both Kathy Boudin, who had only a mi-nor charge similar to Bernardine
Dohrn's outstanding against her, and Judith Clarke, who was in the
clear, also had babies to concern them but they opted to remain
underground. In fact, Kathy Boudin, who always wanted to be identified
with the poor, registered for welfare under an alias (Lydia Adams); she
gave her baby's name as C. Jackson Adams, and called him Chesa, after
her heroine, Joanne Chesimard, ''Queen of the Black Liberation Army.''
All her life, Kathy Boudin, like Diana Oughton, had been an unbending
person, determined to finish what she started. Dur-ing the last two
years, while the radical underground was dwin-dling into irrelevance,
Kathy and other white members of the May 19th Coalition reportedly
became more and more rigid, refusing to shake hands with anyone, for
example, until they knew the person's politics. They lived in a constant
state of dep-rivation and existed in a vacuum; unable to mix freely in
soci-ety, their measure of the world might have been taken in large part
from doomsday headlines in the tabloids. From such isola-tion comes a
kind of paranoia. Although most of the charges against them had been
dropped (much of the evidence against them had been gathered illegally,
it turned out), they felt hunted, and like a wounded bear, they
eventually turned to at-tack those they saw as their hunters. When the
public and even the F.B.I. cared nothing about them, it was the Black
Libera-tion Army with its automatic weapons and reckless abandon that
gave them a purpose: a way to make good on years of rhetoric, once and
for all to prove that they were not just rich kids playing at
revolution.
In the end, however, the degree of rage that sustained them for so long
had its roots in more than social conscience. The young are angry almost
by definition, and it is natural for them to want to save the world. But
as one matures, the world nar-rows and grand designs give way to
personal goals. The Viet-nam War ended. My rage abated as did the rage
of thousands of others of my generation. But those white radicals who
massa-cred innocents at Nyack never seemed to move forth from that
moment in time when they blindly assembled antipersonnel bombs on West
11th Street. In the end, they froze into a tableau that was a chilling
perversion of every purpose they had ever had: the children of the rich
killing the less privileged in the name of revolution. It was clear that
their rage had become psy-chosis, their struggle was with self-hatred,
and the only revolu-tion they would fight was the one taking place in
their own minds.
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, the romance between the Weather Un-derground and
what remained of its public came to an abrupt end. An off-duty
corrections officer named Michael Koch drove into the midst of a gun
battle between police and the assailants fleeing from the Nyack robbery.
He jumped from his car and went off in pursuit of a woman who turned out
to be Kathy Boudin. ''It was a firefight, like I was back in Vietnam,''
Koch said. He struggled to subdue Kathy Boudin and as he did so, the
Weatherwoman looked back at her fleeing B.L.A. accomplices and, in
childlike indignation, screamed: ''I didn't shoot him! He did!''
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Illustrations: photo of Diana Oughton with her nanny in 1967
photo of Diana Oughton in 1969 photo of Kathy Boudin in 1964 photo of
Boudin's wanted poster photo of New York apartment house Bounin lived in
photo of Brink's guard Peter Paige, who was shot in Nyack photo of scene
in Nyack photo of Nyack policeman Waverly Brown, killed in
Copyright 1981 The New York Times Company
23 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Washington Post
November 22, 1981, Sunday, Final Edition
Coming of Age in The Season of Rage Jane Alpert;
The Spent Struggle of the Fugitive & the Quiet Resolution of Life
Underground
BYLINE: By Lynn Darling
SECTION: Style; G1
LENGTH: 5064 words
ON SEPT. 18, 1969, Jane Alpert put on a white A-line dress, kid gloves
and a touch of make-up and tucked a bomb into the oversized handbag she
had stolen from a department store. She rode the bus to the Federal
Building in New York's Foley Square and O took the elevator to the 40th
floor where the De-partment of the Army had its offices. A few minutes
later, she left, leaving the bomb in a room full of electrical
equipment.
She didn't see the bomb go off, never saw the blinding light, never
heard the nerve-cracking explosion that impelled the splinters of glass,
the shards of metal. She was not a witness to the violent aftermath of
her handiwork. She didn't, for that mat-ter, put the bomb together; the
visions of its going off in her face interfered with her manual
dexterity.
But the night she planted the bomb in the Federal Building, she and her
friends assembled on the roof of a nearby building and peered through a
small telescope in the direction of 26 Fed-eral Plaza. At 2 a.m., all
the lights in the building went out.
"Holy s---," someone whispered.
"Did you see that?" asked someone else.
She was, she writes, "too awed to speak," and for "a few hours that
night, I wanted no more happiness."
Jane Alpert was 21 when she was arrested in 1969 for her part in a
bombing conspiracy that blew large and substantial holes into six large
and substantial buildings, including the Whitehall Induction Center, and
the headquarters of Chase Manhattan, General Motors and the Standard Oil
Corp. She was out on $20,000 bond when she was convicted of conspiring
to destroy government property.
A week later she went underground, two months after Kathy Boudin and
Cathy Wilkerson ran naked out of the ruins of a Greenwich Village
townhouse/bomb factory and vanished into the outlaw afternoon. Like
them, she had tried hard to shed her middle-class trappings. But by
then, there was a harder edge to life outside the pale; the soft glow of
hippie love had long ago given way to harsher coruscations that set the
teeth on edge.
Now even Kathy Boudin is back, resurrected in a hail of bul-lets and a
Brinks robbery. The political consequences of her act are lost in the
question of the three dead men in her path and the awesome differences
that 12 years can make. Now Jane Alpert can say, as she works resolutely
at her lunch in the middle of her middle-class working day, "I don't
miss that time. I'm glad it's over."
Alpert was one of the first to return, but one by one, they've come
back, Bernadine Dohrn and Mark Rudd and Cathy Wilkerson, and the
question is whether it was ever possible for them to change themselves
the way they hoped they could, these angry, aging children who tried so
hard to be born again, to replace their awkward pasts with radical
innocence.
They were middle-class kids who had grown up taking mock cover from one
kind of bomb, crouching beneath their desks or in the institutional
hallways, envisioning the mushroom cloud. There had to be a certain
satisfaction in turning the tables. It was, after all, 1969, a different
time, even though it is hard now, and not a little embarrassing, to
remember what it was like, re-membering the eyes stinging from tear gas,
the voices hoarse from shouting Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh -- the crack of a
club -- NLF is gonna win . . . how short the skirts were, how long the
looks . . . remembering teach-ins and sit-ins and flags burning and
draft cards burning and cities burning also . . . " 'The ques-tion now,'
said Miss Dohrn, at an SDS meeting at the beginning of the year, 'is how
do we become more than a campus-based antiwar movement?' " . . . the way
the National Guard would line up and the young girls would put flowers
in the mouths of the rifles and the young men would chant, Join Us, Join
Us, Join Us . . . the way the soldiers would smile sometimes when they
charged. . . . It was acknowledged that the Black Panthers carried guns.
It seemed conceivable that any qualms in this di-rections were a
bourgeois hang-up. . . . "Two, four, six, eight, organize and smash the
state."
Jane Alpert was a leftist when she went underground to lead a lonely
life, singing the outlaw blues with the temporary lovers in the rented
rooms. She thought that her life would end there, fighting for the
revolution she felt sure would come. She waited for a martyr's death.
It didn't come; she became a feminist and raged against the men whose
love she thought would save her and learned to hate them with the same
fury that she had once reserved for the capi-talists and their crimes.
Maybe her hate had been born of the moment, born of the war, but her
anger had been always there, filling in the gaps of her life, making her
less lonely, as she looked for the place where she would finally belong.
She needed the comfort of someone to blame.
By 1974, she needed more than that. Four and a half years after she had
gone underground, Jane Alpert came back, to re-nounce her past and serve
her time.
"This is the happiest day of my life," she said the day she surrendered
to the U.S. marshal in New York.
"I am," she says, "really proud of my life."
The voice is flat, the hazel eyes look steadily ahead. "I had to make
some pretty drastic decisions to get to this point. But I've met a lot
of people who are my age and say they haven't taken enough risks. I do
not," Jane Alpert says, "have that prob-lem."
She sits quiet and tense in the recesses of the Binibon Res-taurant, on
the lower East Side, near the old neighborhood. Af-ter the bombs went
off, after she got caught, the headlines had called her the girl next
door, and, in fact, there is a quiet deco-rum about her, a surface
placidity that betrays nothing of what lies beneath the surface.
In the old newspaper photographs from that lost decade, she looks too
tiny for the anger she is carrying, the frown she is wearing. The pale
face is twisted in hate, the arm raised, the fist clenched, the body
lost in the drab utilitarian clothing of pea coat and blue jeans.
Now she is wearing the armor of the workaday world -- black sweater,
gray slacks, a pink shirt, her brown hair neatly coiffed, a meager smile
playing on her pale lips. The anger is gone, but it's hard to know what
has replaced it, now that she is living out of her time, now that she is
no longer cloaked in the heroic self-image of the urban guerrilla nor
living a semblance of the straight life in the shadows of the
underground.
Jane Alpert looks as if she is still in disguise.
"It is impossible for me to imagine myself bombing a build-ing now," she
says. "It seems harebrained and scary and an act of misdirected rage.
But it is also difficult to recreate the politi-cal climate of those
times, when the standard lunch table talk was about blowing up cops."
She pauses for a moment. "Some people took it more seriously than
others, obviously."
It is the context, she says, that you have to remember. So much killing
then, so much hate. They were not the only ones using bombs. They were
not even the first. It was raining bombs in Vietnam, and it seemed only
appropriate to bring the war home to the army and to the giant
corporations. Besides, she says, "there were so many good people getting
killed, what was the use of being nonviolent?"
Those who took it most seriously called themselves revolu-tionaries,
talked about the struggle. They hardened their ideol-ogy in their anger,
drew back from the traveling circus of the counterculture, enforced the
line. Those who took it most seri-ously made bombs and threw them. In a
season of hate and helplessness there were many who identified with
them, with the Weather Underground, with the Black Panthers, with any
one with one hand on the rhetoric and the other on a gun. There were
those who cheered them onward, covered them in cheap romance, wove their
own fantasies from their example, wove them, that is, within the limits
they had set on their own rebel-lion.
Only a few, of course, crossed the line from fantasy to ac-tion; those
who did looked, somehow ennobled, their anger fiercer, their ideals
stronger. When they went underground they got stuck in time, remembered,
when they were remembered at all, as political fossils. Life had moved
on.
And when they emerged, one by one, it seemed almost in-evitable that
some of them would betray the casual fantasies that had been foisted on
them, their heroism retired on the scrap heap of history, betrayed by
the sometimes embarrassing ways in which they opted out of their images,
designing jeans or find-ing Jesus or the stock market, or indulging in
counterrevolu-tionary hysteria: "I didn't do it, he did."
She started out a middle-class Jewish kid from Forest Hills, New York.
Her parents were the children of Russian immi-grants, refugees from the
pogroms, products of the Depression. The psychological building blocks
included an adored but falli-ble father, a businessman with a history of
false starts and failed ventures before he settled into a successful
partnership in a den-tal equipment business with an old college friend.
His failures in the business world were not quite redeemed in his
daughter's eyes by his eventual success. Her mother was bright,
ambitious and undemonstrative; she and her daughter didn't get along.
There was a younger brother, born with multiple birth defects, and for a
time she resented him for the extra attention he de-manded.
At 14, she read Ayn Rand and dreamed of being a freedom rider, like
those who claimed her attention on the evening news. There was a picture
taken then with the family of her father's business partner and her own.
"The sun is not in my eyes," she writes, in her book, "Growing Up
Underground," "but I am scowling, obviously attempting to spoil the
occasion for the rest. Like some congenital monster, impossible to
dispose of or to love, I am fixedly ignored by both families."
There were the ordinary values and virtues pinned to the persona of a
middle-class white kid growing up in the quiet, complacent '50s,
progress and problems -- the good grades, the lonely adolescence, the
slow burn of an unexplained anger. "My parents were very grateful for
what they had. Everything was handed to us, and gratitude was expected,"
she says now. "There were certain things you didn't question. I remember
sit-ting down once, during the Pledge of Allegiance, to see what would
happen. Everyone was furious with me."
She went to Swarthmore when she was 16, majored in Greek, minored in
muddled affairs, drank the usual draught of adolescent angst. Already,
however there were signs of the chaos to come -- she got arrested at a
demonstration protesting the conditions at a ghetto school in nearby
Chester, a demon-stration where she met Cathy Wilkerson, whom she
regaled with tales of her own courage.
This is what she wrote about the moments before her first ar-rest: "I
had stopped thinking about Franklin School, the citizens of Chester, the
evils of racism and poverty. The utopian vision that had tugged at me
yesterday was gone. In its place was something else, a fury that tore
out of me with a life of its own, primitive as infancy. I was screaming
against everyone and eve-rything that had stood in my way -- the boys
who had rejected me, the man who had fired my father when I was nine, my
ab-sent father, my mother, my brother."
There were other portents -- the friend from high school who went to
Berkeley, had a baby, refused marriage and an abortion and went on
welfare, the friend who went to Rome and died in a suicide pact with her
lover. Random acts of meaningless vio-lence -- the old assumptions were
unraveling.
She graduated from Swarthmore in 1967, and dreamed of becoming an
archeologist. Instead she took a job with Cam-bridge University Press
and graduate courses at Columbia Uni-versity and watched with nose
pressed to the windowpane: life among the revolutionaries seemed to
vibrate with all the energy and camaraderie that was lacking in her own.
Finally in the fall of 1968, she met Sam Melville, tall broad-shouldered
Sam Melville, who dressed like a revolutionary and talked like a
revolutionary, who caught her eye, dark-haired as he was, serious and
intense as he appeared, as he took his place beside her at the
demonstration: Heathcliff in a workshirt.
Eight days later, he called her at home, asked if he could come over. "I
wanted nothing so much as to surrender to his power," she wrote of that
first night, "to lie inert beneath him as he stroked and kissed me into
a frenzy." In the morning, she gave him the spare keys to her apartment.
Remember boys and girls," said a character in what used to be called the
underground comix, "keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart
when you go out to smash the state."
At first, they didn't talk about bombs. At first, she followed him to
the lower East Side, harsh and violent and electric with energy, to a
broken-down tenement flat, where the only heat came from the fireplaces
and the litany of the government's op-pression of the people was chanted
to the light of Coleman lamps. There was an ideological problem with
enriching the coffers of Con Edison. To live there in nerve-searing
intensity among the dropouts and panhandlers and runaways, to the rhythm
of the knife fights and speed freaks and street confronta-tions, to the
tune of the street musicians, to the rhetoric of the times, in the
jingle-jangle mornings and the apocalyptic nights where even the
day-to-day became political, and the very at-mosphere seemed to vibrate
with the redemptive possibilities of anger.
They tried to live as a collective, Jane and Sam, and a woman named Pat
and the man she calls Nate in the book, al-though that is not his real
name. They didn't have straight jobs, there wasn't time. Alpert worked
for the Rat Subterranean News, an underground newspaper that ran
articles stuffed with rhetoric and recipes for Molotov cocktails --
"Yield: One pig car in flames." She was the only woman on the staff, and
when she objected to automatically assuming the role of secretary, the
men invented new titles for her on the mast head, "Hip Prin-cess,"
"Gorilla," "Office Liberator."
In the collective, they dug the ditch between themselves and the
establishment deeper and deeper. The four of them made love in most of
the possible combinations, trying to break what seemed to be the
bourgeois shackles of fidelity. This made her unhappy, but that, she
decided, was her hang-up. Possessive-ness was a capitalist emotion.
They smoked dope, dropped acid. Sometimes the drugs made the day glow,
sometimes they didn't -- "Guilt and shame," Sam muttered about five
hours into a particularly bad trip. "The demons of guilt and shame."
They lived in nervous juxtaposi-tion to the somewhat more visceral
politics of the neighbor-hood, the perpetual gang wars, the looted minds
of the sidewalk heroin addicts, the leering men who pinched her as she
walked by the corner bodega.
All around them were the effects of the war, the govern-ment's
intransigence, the seemingly overwhelming popular op-position. "There
was a culminating rage that the government was not going to express the
will of the people," she says. "It was as if the war gave us permission
to reexamine everything we'd grown up with; it was all part of an ethos,
the sex, the drugs, the politics, everything."
Somewhere along the way, a line was crossed; it is hard now to say when
or where. At first the people in the collective just talked about bombs,
and it was almost like a game of chicken -- no one was going to say they
were bluffing, everyone assumed that the others took it seriously.
It was Sam who decided to look for a cache of explosives to steal, and
who followed little green trucks from downtown blasting sites, hoping to
find the dynamite's source.
It was Jane who suggested that they look under explosives in the Yellow
Pages, if that's what they were looking for. Sure enough, Sam found a
warehouse in the Bronx to rob. It was a piece of cake, although it
bothered Jane that Sam wouldn't let her come because she was a girl.
They stored the 150 sticks of dynamite and the 50 blasting caps in the
refrigerator; it was the only place to keep them in the heat.
At first, she didn't think she'd heard him right.
"I planted a bomb this afternoon," he said.
"You what?"
He said it again. "I planted a bomb."
It wasn't the bomb itself that bothered her that late summer night in
1969. What drove her crazy was the target he'd chosen, the reason he'd
chosen that day to plant it. Sam Melville hadn't decided to bomb the
Marine Midland Bank because it was on the list of the corporate enemies
that every good leftist knew by heart.
No, he had chosen his target because its glass and steel gleamed
arrogantly in the sun, because it looked like the sort of place where
the enemies of the people would be found. There was no symbolism to the
timing. It was not the birthday of a revolutionary hero, not the
anniversary of some corporate atroc-ity. He had planted the bomb that
day because she had told him she was going out with another man that
night.
She asked him what time it was set to go off. Eleven o'clock, he said.
That meant the bomb would explode in two hours' time, when there would
still be people in the building, cleaning women and late-working
secretaries, their power-driven bosses. She ran to a pay phone to call
the security guard to warn him, but the man on the other end of the
phone heard the pleading voice, registered the fact that it was female,
and didn't believe her. "I'd like to help you, lady, really I would. But
I don't leave this post until midnight when I make rounds."
The bomb went off at 11, just as Sam had said it would. Twenty employes
were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment, just as she had
feared. Something had to be done. Someone had to take responsibility,
pay attention, take heed of the consequences, to orchestrate the
planting of the other bombs. To do it right.
"I sought out someone who would help me act out my fanta-sies," she says
now. "I did certain things that he manipulated me to do, but, in the
end, it led to a deeper commitment. It was easy to take the lead, after
that. He didn't know what he was do-ing." She did, of course; she was
the bright one, the hardwork-ing overacheiver, the honors graduate whose
desire for perfec-tion hadn't changed simply because she had decided to
enlist in the revolution.
"The Establishment is in for some big surprises if it thinks that
kangaroo courts and death sentences can arrest a revolu-tion. The anger
of youth and all oppressed people is mounting against this mockery of
justice. There's one thing the cowards that rule the world might as well
know now: The will to free-dom of the people is stronger than the fear
of any repression. Liberty or death!" -- A note she left at one of the
bombings.
"Were we happy then?" she says. "It wasn't something we thought about.
The times were too frenetic to think about hap-piness. Besides,
happiness was a bourgeois emotion."
She is walking along Avenue B toward the apartment she used to share
with Sam Melville and the bright white light of an autumn afternoon
appears, for the moment, to scour the misery from the littered, empty
street. Only for a moment,though, be-fore the tumbled tenements come
back into focus and the sun glints on things fast and sharp and shiny.
It is hard to read her expression. Her eyes are as impassive as those of
the men who sit staring, not speaking, in front of corner stores with
Spanish names. The graffiti on the walls merely mention the names of
temporary lovers and the music of punk rock bands; there are no calls to
arms, no messages to the masses, although the word "kneecapping" is
there in big black letters.
There is the grocery store from which she used to steal half of their
food and the dog food for their pets, Bernadette Devlin and John Keats.
It was new then, and so there was a particularly piquant thrill to
stealing from its freshly laden shelves, to deal-ing a blow to the
capitalist bounty. "I got caught once," she says with a reluctant smile.
"But it being the time it was, I yelled at the security guard, telling
him that it was a capitalist pig estab-lishment and he was a dupe of the
system, and he shrugged and let me go."
There is the mom and pop store that sold the racist bread, or at least
that's what Sam called the fresh loaves of rye she bought there after he
heard what he thought was a racist com-ment coming from the owner. There
is the laundromat she fre-quented, there the electrician's shop where
the FBI agents watched their comings and goings those last few days
before Sam and Jane were arrested, there the store that sold the little
Westclox alarm clocks they liked to use in the building of their bombs.
The empty streets seemed filled with ghosts, with the dead and the
missing and the living with whom there is no longer any connection but
the bitter words of the last irreparable quar-rel. She has been, after
all, a woman of harsh conviction, and she has been known to change her
mind. But no, she says, "there are no ghosts, I've really put my ghosts
to rest. My ghosts," she says, "are dead." She doesn't hear the
silences, not anymore. "When I first came back," she says, "it seemed
eerie. But then I realized it wasn't eerie, it was just normal people
leading normal lives."
Her eyes soften for a moment, and for a moment she is no longer on
emotional hold. "You know, being down here makes me feel like I was
pretty happy," she says softly. She is thinking about "having breakfast
with Sam, looking out the window, and people, our friends, dropping by."
The day she went underground, in 1970, she boarded a train at
Pennsylvania Station. The station was full of demonstrators, it rang
with their camaraderie. She was in disguise, her brown hair bleached an
attempted blond, a pair of tortoise-shell glasses replacing the contact
lenses, a new dress from Bloomingdale's and thick pancake make-up
separating her from the tattered jeans and ragtag exuberance of the
protesters. She thought that they must despise her for her apparent
allegiance to the other side of the cultural divide, and she felt again
on the outside.
To live outside the law, you must be honest; no one ever said anything
about being alone.
Over the next four years, she traveled the country, living day to day,
chafed by the fierce paranoia that caused her at times to fear that the
car she was traveling in through the Midwest was bugged, that the
sheriff in the coffee shop in Kansas had no-ticed her, that the man
leafing through the radical magazine in the commune in Michigan would
recognize her. She depended on the kindess of strangers.
She watched friendships wear thin, crack and finally break. The Yippies
in Indianapolis got angry when she overstayed her welcome. The fugitive
with whom she shared a house in the depths of a snowbound New England
winter got on her nerves so much she threw a bottle of molasses at her;
she was scraping the sticky remains from the wall for days. The plans
for revolu-tion eroded slowly, changed into the mere hope of survival,
and finally into the question of why she continued. She called her-self
Frances Ethel Mathews, she called herself Ellen Davis Blake, she longed
for the sound of her own name.
She found jobs as a waitress, and as a medical assistant, she found
temporary refuge in a rented farmhouse, a rented room. She talked on pay
phones to other pay phones, she froze when-ever someone, laughing,
produced a camera, wanting to capture a giddy moment, to preserve the
present. A terrifying idea, when the past is already preserved on a
wanted poster. ("Cau-tion," read the poster: "Alpert reportedly
advocates the use of explosives and may possess firearms. Consider
dangerous.")
She saw America, and the kid from New York City was as-tonished at her
first look of the country she had become used to spelling Amerika. "The
geography and the landscape dazzled me. I was seeing what had made
America. The people in these isolated places seemed to live in harmony
with the land," she says. "I was sipping coffee one day in the Sierra
Nevada with a woman who had lived there for the last 50 years. She sat
there talking about the last blizzard she had survived, and somehow, it
didn't seem right to ask her about the Vietnam war. Some-how, we had
missed the pulse of the country. I found that for a long time, I had
been pulling in impressions and fitting them into a system of thought
and I couldn't do that anymore."
She was surprised as well by the avenues of support. It was-n't from the
radicals she once imagined to be her comrades in arms. "I was amazed by
the overwhelming generosity of my parents and college friends, friends I
had scorned for their bourgeois life styles. They helped me out of just
plain human generosity and compassion, not for political reasons."
In the beginning she had hoped that someday she would be reunited with
Sam Melville. He wrote her a letter once, on five squares of toilet
paper: "Despite an incredible irrational bias, bourgeois science now
admits the sense of smell as being the longest retained in the memory,"
he wrote. "In the environment in which i live, one develops the memory
of a mastodon. Yes, sweet bitch, i love you. And if they ever let me out
and the wind is right, i'll find you."
He never did, he died first, killed in the Attica riots of 1971. In the
beginning, she cherished his memory, and wrote an in-troduction to a
collection of his prison letters that bathed their time together in a
loving light. But when she showed the essay to her feminist friends,
they were horrified, pointing out to her the masochism on her part, the
cruelty on his.
By then she had joined a consciousness-raising group in San Diego, and
drank deeply of the warmth and support she found there. By then, she had
grown apart from men. There had been lovers along the road, fellow
travelers, some of them strung out on drugs and uncertainty, slipping on
the glazed ice of life on the other side of the mirror. But they would
fall away, in part because "the sexual intimacy was a way of letting
down barri-ers, and that wasn't something I could afford to do. And
since fugitive life was supposed to be permanent I couldn't afford to
admit that it was dictating my choices. So when the Nixon
ad-ministration ceased being a focus of hostility, I transferred it to
men as a gender. I think," she says, "that most of the men that knew me
at the time would have described me as hard to get along with."
In time, she broke with the women in the Weather Under-ground as well,
although for years all she wanted was to be a part of their closed
circle. In 1972, she met with Bernadine Dohrn in Golden Gate Park, was
charmed by her "slow daz-zling smile," amazed by the fiery red she had
dyed her hair. She wondered if she had "wimped out" when she tried
ineffectually to convert Dohrn to her brand of radical feminism as they
sat one afternoon on Mount Tamalpais, Dohrn in her crocheted bi-kini
top, acting like "some Great Mother Underground, ready to hear the
prayers of all fugitive faiths."
She envied Dohrn her friendship with Cathy Wilkerson, the way they tried
to protect each other from curious eyes in a pub-lic restaurant. She was
intimidated by Kathy Boudin, with whom she spent a dreary day in a
tenement in Boston, arguing against what she considered to be the sexism
of the Weather Underground and longing for something more to eat than
the plain yogurt and cucumbers to be found in the refrigerator.
She was always looking for something to be a part of; the needle of the
compass swung violently enough, but it wasn't just politics that
determined its direction, but the passion to be-long. When she could not
convince the Weatherwomen to for-sake their male colleagues, she turned
her back all the more ve-hemently on her commitment to the community
that had driven her underground.
Now she was a radical feminist. She disavowed her leftist past; it was
riddled with male oppressors. The shift was a vio-lent one; in an open
letter to her "sisters in the Weather Under-ground" she wrote, "you fast
and organize and demonstrate for Attica. Don't send me news clippings
about it, don't tell me how much those deaths moved you. I will mourn
the loss of 42 male supremacists no longer."
In the end, she was living as Carla Weinstein, the secretary in an
orthodox Jewish school in Denver, Colo., watching the Watergate hearings
on TV with an addict's compulsion. Her fa-vorite character was Jeb
Stuart Magruder, whose plea "that he was misled by his patriotic ideals
and by his superiors was very moving to me."
And so, she came back. "I wasn't fulfilling any political pur-pose," she
says now. "There wasn't any place in the under-ground for a women's
movement." She served two years in prison while the rumors swirled among
the feminists and what was left of the left that she had informed on the
others still on the outside, rumors she denied then, denies now.
She has a job now, writing position papers for a family-planning agency.
"Part of growing up for me," she says slowly, "is learning to be content
with making small changes. You have to learn to feel happy, short of
revolution." She worries a little that she will lose the "vigilant
skepticism" that is one of the few legacies of the period she would like
to keep. She lives alone, in Greenwich Village. She has a gray and white
cat named Gri-malkin. She had a love affair that recently ended. She
likes to swim two or three times a week, and she sees her parents once a
month. She wants "family and friends, a sense of integrity, con-tinuity.
I want a feeling of where I came from and where I'm going. I'd like to
write another book. I'd like to have a kid or two. I'd like to travel."
And no, she says, the sudden, violent re-emergence of Kathy Boudin did
not strike as close to home as might be expected. Too much time, too
much distance; she had come in from the cold a long time before, had
warmed herself in front of other fires. She had released the complicated
tension long ago.
"The thing I really identified with," she says, "was the deaths at
Jonestown. The fact that it was a utopian community, interracial,
pro-communist, I could identify with that. I could understand," Jane
Alpert says with the flicker of a smile, "what drove them to look for
simple solutions."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, no caption; Picture 2, no caption, by Nancy Kay for
The Washington Post; Picture 3, It was 1969, a year of demonstrations,
the year Jane Alpert was arrested for her part in a bombing conspiracy.
Above is the rubble of a townhouse alleged to have been a Weatherman
bomb factory in New York that was destroyed in a 1970 explosion, UPI
photo.
Copyright 1981 The Washington Post
24 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
February 16, 1982, Tuesday, AM cycle
Phony Drivers' Licenses Traced to Defunct Child's Wear Shop
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 377 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A defunct children's wear store where former Weather Un-derground leader
Bernardine Dohrn once worked has figured in the investigation of the
botched $1.6 million Brink's robbery.
Police declined to say Tuesday what role was played by the store, which
was named Broadway Baby. But The New York Times said the Upper West side
store was the place where, in December 1979, two women paid for
purchases by check and gave their drivers' licenses numbers as
identification.
Impostors then used the innocent women's names and num-bers to obtain
duplicate driver's licenses on the pretext that they had been lost.
The duplicates served as identification for renting vans used in an
aborted armored-car holdup in Greenburgh, N.Y., and in a successful
$500,000 armored-car heist in Inwood, The Times said.
The FBI, which has been speaking for the joint FBI-New York police task
force investigating the $1.6 million Brink's holdup last October, in
which two policemen and a guard were slain, declined to comment on the
Times report.
Detective Kevin O'Grady of the 47th Precinct, where parts of the Brink's
holdup inquiry were pursued, confirmed that the name of Broadway Baby
came up and that it was a matter of record that Miss Dohrn worked there.
Miss Dohrn, a fugitive for 10 years, surfaced in November 1980 and was
given three years probation and fined $1,500 on charges growing out of
violent demonstrations in Chicago in the late 1960s. She has not been
accused of playing a role in any of the robberies.
The Times quoted police sources as saying David Gilbert, one of the
former Weather Underground figures charged in the Brink's holdup, has
been linked by fingerprint or handwriting to renting vans that figured
in three armored car holdups before the Brink's job and in Joanne
Chesimard's escape from prison in New Jersey in 1979.
Miss Chesimard, who was doing time for killing a New Jer-sey state
trooper, was a leader of the Black Liberation Army, two of whose members
have been charged in the Brink's rob-bery.
The former Weather Underground members charged in the Brink's case, in
addition to Gilbert, are Katherine Boudin and Judith Clark.
Miss Dohrn reportedly has been caring for Miss Boudin's infant son,
Chesa, who was fathered by Gilbert.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
25 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
February 16, 1982, Tuesday, Late City Final Edi-tion
BEHIND THE BRINK'S CASE: RETURN OF THE RADICAL LEFT
BYLINE: By M.A. FARBER
SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 4838 words
Four months after the slayings of a Brink's guard and two policemen in
an armored-car robbery in Rockland County, a complex story has begun to
emerge of a subterranean culture sustained by a small network of people
who view themselves as warriors in a global revolution.
It is a group of single-minded people leading double lives, often under
multiple aliases, of former Black Panthers and Weather Underground
leaders, now in their middle 30's, who returned suddenly and
dramatically to public attention after a decade in which their names had
been largely forgotten.
Within an hour of the shootings on Oct. 20, three of them were arrested
when their speeding car containing bulletproof vests, ski masks and
canvas bank moneybags smashed to a halt against a concrete retaining
wall in Nyack, N.Y. Those arrests, and others that followed, revived an
atmosphere of radical left-ism surviving from the years of antiwar
protest and civil-rights activity.
Why these men and women were in Rockland County, as at least some of
them were, is only now coming out in interviews with lawenforcement
authorities, defense attorneys, friends of the accused and some of the
defendants themselves.
Quiet Lives in the 70's
For many of those accused, the late 1970's now appear to have been a
time of living quietly, having children, selling jew-elry or fighting
for tenants in housing disputes, earning modest incomes moving potatoes
and carrots from Hunts Point to Rockefeller Center at 4 A.M. or
collecting welfare while pick-ing up tips serving chicken and ice cream
to the crowds at the U.S. Open tennis tournament.
But it was also a time, law-enforcement officials say, when an unusual
alliance was forged between white socialists such as Judith A. Clark,
Katharine Boudin and David J. Gilbert, who had been prominent figures in
the domestic upheavals of the Vietnam War era, and black nationalists
who had moved on to an amorphous organization called the Black
Liberation Army.
Law-enforcement officials, who portray the defendants as
''executioners,'' say they believe that the $1.6 million recovered after
the holdup would have financed guns and ammunition, clandestine travel,
and ''safe houses'' for hiding and planning future crimes. They also say
that the robbery in Nanuet, N.Y., was the latest such action by a
network of ''terrorists,'' many of them with long criminal records, who
have been holding up ar-mored cars in the New York area for at least two
years.
For example, according to police sources, Mr. Gilbert has been recently
linked by fingerprint or handwriting analysis to the rental of vehicles
used in three armored car holdups that preceded Nanuet and to the prison
escape in 1979 of Joanne Chesimard, a reputed Black Liberation Army
leader who was serving a life term for the murder of a New Jersey state
trooper in 1973.
And in two of the armored car robberies, in early 1980, the police are
studying an apparent connection between the rental of the vehicles and
personal identification supplied several months earlier by unsuspecting
customers at Broadway Baby, an Upper West Side children's wear shop that
was managed by Bernadine Dohrn, a former Weather Underground leader.
Miss Dohrn has not been publicly linked to the Brink's case or any of
the other robberies.
Miss Dohrn, who surrendered to authorities in late 1980 and was placed
on probation for an 11-year-old assault charge, is now caring for Miss
Boudin's 16-month-old son, Chesa, whose father is Mr. Gilbert.
To their supporters and advisers in such groups as the May 19th
Communist Organization and the Republic of New Afrika, which seeks to
carve out a black nation from five Southern states, the accused are
''heroes'' who were engaged in an ''ex-propriation'' of funds that would
have been used to improve conditions for the poor.
And many of these figures, according to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and their own statements, had come to regard violence as
inevitable.
''There has always been an aspect of armed struggle in every movement
for social change,'' Miss Clark said in an interview at the state prison
in Woodbourne, N.Y. Miss Clark, who was re-moved from the wrecked car in
Nyack on Oct. 20 wearing a wig and carrying an ammunition clip in her
pocketbook, has re-fused to enter a plea to murder and robbery charges
stemming from the holdup of the Brink's truck earlier that day outside a
bank at the Nanuet Mall.
Although the violence in Rockland County, 25 miles north of New York
City, has been widely condemned by liberals and others who were
sympathetic to the protests of student radicals and blacks in the
1960's, Nathaniel Burns, another of the eight Rockland defendants,
stressed that the incident was ''no attack on the oppressed.''
''That was no candy store up there,'' the 35-year-old former leader of
the Black Panther Party said in an interview in the prison ward of Kings
County Hospital, where he was being watched over by policemen toting
machine guns. Mr. Burns was recovering from an abdominal ailment. Like
most of his co-de@fendants, he denied planning or taking part in the
Rock-land crime. But he said he supported ''people struggling for their
freedom against an illegal, fascist, racist government'' and that,
regrettably, blacks never achieved as much as when they threatened
violence.
''Look at the period from 1963 to 1971,'' he remarked. ''Peo-ple said,
'Burn, baby, burn,' and we got more done than ever.'' Of all the
defendants, the best known is Miss Boudin, who was arrested while
fleeing on foot from the melee that accompanied the shooting of the two
policemen at a roadblock. She is at the Woodbourne prison with Mr.
Gilbert, Miss Clark and Samuel Brown, the three other persons who were
captured in Rockland County on Oct. 20. Three other defendants,
including Mr. Burns, were later seized here and in Philadelphia; an
eighth suspect, Marilyn Jean Buck, is still being sought.
Miss Boudin, whose father, Leonard, is a noted constitu-tional lawyer,
was one of two women in the Weather Under-ground who escaped an
explosion in 1970 at a Greenwich Vil-lage town house that had been
converted into a bomb factory. In 1975 she was one of five fugitives who
were seen in a film made to garner support for a cause that was on the
wane.
PICK UP TAKE 2
''Underground on the West Side''
Underground on the West Side
By the late 1970's the Weather Underground's base of sup-port among the
young had seriously eroded and the organiza-tion, which had dwindled
from perhaps 300 to 50 members, ceased its symbolic bombings of public
buildings, in which no lives had been lost. Divided over questions of
ideology and tac-tics, and hampered by personal quarrels, the Weather
Under-ground dissolved and some of its leaders, including Miss Dohrn,
Mark Rudd and Cathlyn P. Wilkerson (who also had escaped from the town
house), prepared to give themselves up to the authorities on assault and
other charges, generally stem-ming from demonstrations a decade earlier.
Not so Miss Boudin or Mr. Gilbert.
Mr. Gilbert, who has long argued that communism and ''Third World
revolution'' carried out through a ''people's war'' were the only paths
to equal justice, spent the early 1970's in the Denver area, where he
was once arrested on charges of ar-son and assaulting a policeman. He
fled from those charges and apparently went to California. Friends
recall the 37-year-old Rockland defendant as having said that he worked
among Mexican-American laborers in Colorado and later for a moving
company in San Francisco.
Like Miss Boudin, who by one account worked in the early 1970's as a
nurse's aide in a Boston hospital, Mr. Gilbert ulti-mately returned to
New York and to the neighborhood around Columbia University, where he
had been active in Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960's.
Using a false Social Security number and the alias Lou Wasser, he went
to work around 1980 for an Upper West Side moving company, hauling
furniture and vegetables. On his job application, which was never
checked, he said he had worked as a warehouseman for the Itkin Brothers
office furniture company and as a stock clerk for B. Dalton booksellers.
'A Political Person'
''Lou was a decent, sensitive, fully emotional human being,'' said Dan
Schnaidt, one of his co-workers at the moving com-pany. ''He was a hard
worker and you could tell he was a politi-cal person, concerned about
issues like feminism. He used to give the guys on the trucks a hard time
when they made re-marks about women on the streets.''
At the moving company, Mr. Schnaidt said, ''Lou found the perfect cover,
though we didn't know it. He was so good at not being evasive. He said
that he was really a writer and, of course, most of us working here are
writers or musicians or ac-tors or painters.'' Mr. Gilbert was also
remembered at the mov-ing company for his frugality - ''He brown-bagged
his lunch, health foods mostly, and he never had any money,'' said the
of-fice manager. ''I recall him once scratching around for eight more
dollars to pay his rent.''
Mr. Gilbert discussed politics with a few of his fellow em-ployees,
deploring the conditions under which people lived in South and Central
America, condemning the ''lies'' surrounding such measures as the Gulf
of Tonkin resolution during the Vietnam War.
''Basically Lou was a humanitarian who was outraged at what people could
do to one another,'' one of his co-workers said. ''I got a letter from
him after his arrest and he sees himself as having a small but necessary
part in history; a long history, something beyond even the third world
revolution.''
Mr. Gilbert never invited his co-workers home, and, while he gave the
moving company his correct phone number, he gave them a home address
that is, in fact, a church cemetery. He actually lived in a $109-a-month
room in the apartment of an elderly man in Washington Heights who knew
him, not as Lou Wasser, but as Lou Grossman. To that room, with its wall
posters demanding equal rights for blacks, Mr. Gilbert often brought
Chesa and Lynn Adams, as Miss Boudin called herself.
Roommates Near Columbia
Miss Boudin, who is 38, preferred to live apart from Mr. Gilbert.
Several years ago she moved into a five-room coopera-tive apartment at
50 Morningside Drive, near Columbia, where she shared quarters with the
apartment's owner, Rita Jensen, then a reporter for The Advocate of
Stamford, Conn., and Miss Jensen's two young children.
In the immediate aftermath of the Nanuet holdup, Miss Jen-sen described
Miss Boudin, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, as a considerate,
intelligent person with ''a sense of principle''; as a woman, who as her
mother had once wanted her to, was thinking about applying to medical
school.
Miss Boudin was also known as Lynn at the Children's Free School, at 560
West 113th Street, a parents' cooperative at-tended by Miss Jensen's
children. Because parents were re-quired to contribute time to the
school, and Miss Jensen was working in Connecticut, Miss Boudin often
substituted for her.
Besides collecting a welfare check every two weeks for $177.75 under the
name Lydia Adams, Miss Boudin worked, from time to time, as a waitress.
In the summers of 1978, 1979 and 1981, for example, she was employed by
a catering concern to serve fast foods to fans at the U.S. Open tennis
tournament in Flushing Meadows. Miss Boudin told her employer that her
name was Elizabeth Hartwell and that she lived at the Hotel Empire near
Lincoln Center. Just as she had a Social Security card in the name of
Lydia Adams, she had one in the Hartwell name.
''She was very sociable,'' said Michael Vavarro, an official of the
catering concern. ''Last summer she showed us pictures of the baby; I
remember there was something like a log cabin in the photos and she said
they had been taken in California or Canada. Last October, just before
this thing happened, she called me, looking for more work.''
David Gilbert was also looking for work at that time. He had stayed away
from the moving company for months, saying he was working on a
historical novel under a grant from a ''writers' foundation.'' But
shortly before the Rockland shootout, he let the company know he would
be ready for odd jobs by Novem-ber.
PICK UP TAKE 3
''From Broadway Baby to Nanuet Mall''
From Broadway Baby to Nanuet Mall
Law-enforcement officials say that Mr. Gilbert's main occu-pation had
nothing to do with furniture or books, and that they nearly caught up
with him before he got to the Nanuet Mall.
Their account begins on Dec. 27, 1979, when a young woman who lived on
Riverside Drive strolled into Broadway Baby, at 2244 Broadway, near 80th
Street, to buy clothing for her infant. The woman paid by check, showing
her driver's li-cense for identification. The next day someone posing as
that woman walked into a State Department of Motor Vehicles of-fice in
the Bronx. She said she had lost her license and needed a replacement.
After completing an application with the correct personal data about the
Riverside Drive woman, the impostor was given the duplicate license.
That same day an impostor in Yonkers got a duplicate license in the name
of a physician's wife who had also shopped at Broadway Baby in December
1979.
On Feb. 20, 1980, officials now say, the duplicate license of the
physician's wife was used to rent a van on Long Island that figured in
an aborted armored car holdup in Greenburgh, N.Y., in Westchester
County. The woman renting the van, which was abandoned near the scene of
the robbery, said she was a wait-ress at the Blarney Castle restaurant
at 103 West 72d Street. In that case, a longtime criminal named Eugene
Covington, who had once been convicted of a triple homicide, pleaded
guilty. His accomplices, evidently two men and a woman, escaped.
$500,000 Armored Car Robbery
On March 22, 1980, according to the officials, the duplicate license of
the woman from Riverside Drive was used to rent a van in White Plains
that figured in an armored car robbery in Inwood, L.I., where five
bandits made off with $500,000. Again, the woman told the rental agency
that she was a waitress at the Blarney Castle. Renting from the same
agency that day was a white man, who, impersonating a real Manhattan
resident named Schatzkin, had obtained a duplicate license on Dec. 27,
1979. Moreover, the day before the robbery a woman in In-wood whose home
had recently been burglarized took down the license number of a car
cruising the area. The plate, officials say, was traced to a friend of
Nathaniel Burns.
On March 28, 1981, a man who had impersonated a real Manhattan resident
named Hersh and obtained a duplicate li-cense rented a van in
Connecticut that was used in an aborted armored car robbery in Danbury,
Conn., in which one of several bandits fired a high-powered weapon at
the windshield of the armored car. The driver, who escaped injury, sped
off. On June 2, 1981, at least four robbers made off with $292,000 after
am-bushing an armored car in the north Bronx, and shooting to death one
of the guards. Officials say the van was rented by a man who had
obtained a duplicate license by impersonating a real Manhattan resident
named Barranco.
While investigating the June 2 robbery last summer, and try-ing to
determine whether any of the previous holdups were re-lated, Bronx
detectives found only one connection between the woman from Riverside
Drive and the physician's wife - their having shopped at Broadway Baby.
And when they discovered that Miss Dohrn had been the manager of the
boutique between September 1979 and February 1980, and had apparently
waited on the Riverside Drive woman and perhaps the physician's wife as
well, they sensed a ''political'' element to the case.
Senior police officials were alerted to the development, and flyers
bearing the physical descriptions of the two renters in the earlier
holdups and the various names they had used were dis-tributed to 300
car-rental locations in the New York area. One of those was a small
National Car Rental agency on Smith Street in Brooklyn, where, at 9:05
A.M. on Oct. 20, a woman using the alias Judith Schneider - a woman who
had previously rented at that agency on Oct. 12 -rented a red Chevrolet
van. Seven hours later the van figured in the holdup in Rockland County.
Fingerprint on Application
Soon after the Nanuet shootout, officials say, they found David
Gilbert's fingerprint on the application for the Barranco duplicate
license used to rent the van in the June 2 Bronx rob-bery. Government
handwriting experts, they say, have also con-cluded that the same person
- Mr. Gilbert - filled out the Hersh and Schatzkin applications, too.
And the handwriting on the Barranco application, they add, is the same
handwriting as on a counterfeit Pennsylvania license that was used to
rent a van used in the escape of Miss Chesimard from a prison in
Clinton, N.J., on Nov. 2, 1979. Miss Chesimard is still at large.
The identity of the woman who impersonated the two Broadway Baby
patrons, and who may also have used the alias Judith Schneider last
October, has not been established. Eve Rosahn, a supporter of the May
19th Communist Organization whose borrowed Honda was used in the
Rockland incident, was at first accused of being the Schneider woman but
was later ex-onerated. Miss Boudin and Miss Clark have resisted an
effort by law enforcement officials to get samples of their handwriting
and hair. According to the police, a copy of the Oct. 12 Brook-lyn
rental agreement was found in Miss Boudin's apartment.
PICK UP TAKE 4
''The View From Behind Prison Bars''
The View From Behind Prison Bars
Miss Dohrn, who law-enforcement officials believe was in contact with
Miss Boudin in recent years, left Broadway Baby, which is now out of
business, just before giving birth to her second child. Now 40, she
occasionally lectures and writes arti-cles and may have resumed working
as a waitress here. She did not respond to requests for comment through
her lawyer and several friends.
Miss Clark declined, in the interview at Woodbourne prison, to say
whether she had kept in touch over the years with any of her present
co-defendants, although she had known Mr. Gilbert for more than a decade
and, according to the superintendent of the Upper West Side apartment
building where Miss Clark had lived with two women since 1978, a man
resembling Mr. Gil-bert visited her occasionally. Miss Clark would also
not discuss the specifics of her involvement in the Rockland holdup.
A diminutive woman with an angular face and hands that seemed always in
motion, Miss Clark, 32, traced her political education back to junior
high school in Brooklyn in the early 1960's, when she first came to
believe that black children were getting a ''destructive''
education.From that time, Miss Clark said, ''there has been a certain
continuity to my political in-volvement.''
Miss Clark, who was expelled from the University of Chi-cago in 1969 for
her part in a student demonstration, and who later served seven months
in a Chicago jail for her role in the Weathermen ''Days of Rage'' street
disorders, has been ''above ground'' since 1971. While employed here as
a word processor or a legal secretary, she spent much of the 1970's
raising sup-port for the defense of ''political prisoners'' and helping
to put out a prisoners' newspaper.
In 1978 Miss Clark became spokesman for the May 19th Communist
Organization, a new Marxist-Leninist group that had been the East Coast
faction of the Weather Underground's successor, the Prairie Fire
Organizing Committee. The May 19th group, named after the joint birthday
of Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh, has an all-white membership, including
some ''radical feminists.''
With headquarters in a downtown Brooklyn tenement, and with ''strategic
leadership from the Black Revolutionary Na-tionalist movement in Amerika,''
the organization proselytizes through pamphlets and demonstrations for
''self-determination'' for victims of ''u.s. imperialism.''
'Racist White Feminists'
Not all their efforts, however, are appreciated by black mili-tants. As
recently as several months ago a group of well-known ''B.L.A.-POW's'' in
prison here criticized the ''opportunism'' of ''May 19th racist white
feminists'' and also deplored the leader-ship of the 13-year-old
Republic of New Afrika. The black prisoners said, among other things,
that the Afrika group had failed to keep a promise to buy a home
computer to analyze documents in suits against the Federal Government,
such as one in which Miss Clark, who was the subject of illegal F.B.I.
sur-veillance in the early 1970's, is the lead plaintiff.
Miss Clark, who represented her group at a Palestine Libera-tion
Organization conference in Beirut a month before the Na-nuet shootout,
said the other day that her political thinking had been transformed by
the speeches and writings of Malcolm X.
''I was just rereading Malcolm,'' the prisoner added with a smile. ''I
have the book here.'' Miss Clark said that working within the American
political system was a contradiction in terms. ''You can't expect
justice from an unjust system. Look what's happening today, with the
Klan on the rise and Reaganomics and this whole idea of 'the new
Federalism' that will only mean starvation and lower-quality medical
care for the poor. The system is in crisis.''
Miss Clark, peering out a barred window at the snow-covered Catskill
Mountains, dismissed the idea that she had en-dangered the well-being of
her daughter, Harriet, who was born last spring and who she said was now
being cared for by ''com-rades.''
''I don't want my child to grow up in a corrupt society,'' she said,
noting that her parents had taught her that all people have
''fundamental rights.'' Miss Clark's father, Joseph, was Moscow
correspondent of The Daily Worker before he broke with the Communist
Party in 1957. He later was director of press rela-tions for the
American Cancer Society, and is now retired. The defendant's mother,
Ruth, is an executive of Yankelovich, Skelly and White, the polling
concern.
Asked about the ''rights'' of the people slain in the Rockland incident,
Miss Clark again invoked Malcolm X. ''As Malcolm said, the government
makes the criminals the victims and the victims the criminals.''
Among the ''political prisoners'' whom Miss Clark supported in the
1970's was Marilyn Buck, now one of Miss Clark's co-defendants in the
Rockland case. Miss Buck, 34, who has been described by law enforcement
officials as the only white mem-ber of the Black Liberation Army, was
imprisoned on a weap-ons conviction between 1974 and 1977 at a Federal
institution in Alderson, W. Va., where she was visited by Miss Clark and
Susan V. Tipograph, a young New York lawyer who was then representing
Miss Buck and is now representing Miss Clark. On July 1, 1977, while
Miss Buck was on a furlough in connection with a legal appeal, she
absconded from Miss Tipograph's apartment on West 14th Street, and has
not been captured.
A String of Aliases
According to Kenneth Gribetz, the Rockland County District Attorney,
Miss Buck's white Oldsmobile was used in the escape from Nanuet; the
blood-soaked car was found later that day in Westchester County. Under a
string of aliases, he said, Miss Buck had earlier rented a number of
apartments in the New York area that were used as ''safe houses,''
including one in Mount Vernon that was hurriedly emptied on the
afternoon of Oct. 20 by Miss Buck and others who were later indicted.
Mr. Burns, in the interview at Kings County Hospital, said he thought he
had met Miss Buck in Algeria, where he fled just before being charged in
1969 with plotting to kill police offi-cers and blow up department
stores in Manhattan. In that case, known as the ''Panther 21'' case, the
defendants were acquitted. Mr. Burns, who is also known as Sekou Odinga,
secretly re-turned to this country in the 1970's and, using various
aliases, began selling African imports and jewelry. All the while, he
said, he ''worked in local struggles to improve schools, feed the hungry
and expose police brutality; I've worked all my dog life.''
Mr. Burns said he had ''often heard people say the time is not right for
action - I know black people don't like taking to the streets and
getting their heads beat in.''
''But the causes that made people take to the streets before are still
with us,'' he said. ''The struggle is necessary.'' The de-fendant said
the Brink's company stood for the ''very system that is fighting
blacks,'' and, while he regretted the fact that one of the policemen
slain at the Nyack roadblock was black, ''the color of a lion that
attacks me @doesn't matter.''
Although Mr. Burns said he played no part in the Rockland incident, law
enforcement officials said he had been identified from photographs by a
number of witnesses. Photographic iden-tification and, in some
instances, fingerprints in the ''safe houses'' form much of the basis
for the indictments of the four defendants who were not captured in
Rockland.
These defendants include two men -Donald Weems and An-thony LaBorde
-whom Mr. Burns has known since high school in Queens and who have
extensive criminal records. The men, like Samuel Smith, who was killed
in a shootout with the police in Queens Oct. 23, are believed to have
engaged in community organizing and other work in the Ocean
Hill-Brownsville sec-tion of Brooklyn, in Harlem and in the South Bronx.
Mr. Smith was shot after a wild car chase in which Mr. Burns was
captured. Both of them were wearing bulletproof vests and, in Mr.
Smith's pocket, the police found a flattened .38-caliber slug that was
traced to a weapon used in Nyack by one of the slain officers.
Suspects in Prison Escape
Mr. Weems and Mr. LaBorde are suspects in the prison es-cape of Miss
Chesimard. Mr. Weems escaped twice from New Jersey prisons in the
1970's, where he was serving a sentence for bank robbery. He had
previously pleaded guilty to a charge of shooting at policemen, a charge
in which Mr. Burns, by then a fugitive, was also implicated by
law-enforcement officials.
Another defendant, Samuel Brown, has been described by Chokwe Lumumba,
one of the defense lawyers in the Rockland case, as ''the kind of street
brother who provides the backbone to the movement.'' Mr. Brown - who
like several of the other defendants has charged the police with
physical brutality - was arrested last May, police said, carrying a
loaded 9-millimeter pistol, in what they said was an attempt to steal a
car.
Mr. LaBorde, who was wanted for the ambush-slaying of Police Officer
John Scarangello in Queens last April 16, was, in recent years, a
paralegal aide at Bronx Legal Services, a feder-ally financed
antipoverty program. Mr. LaBorde worked on tenants' rights matters. ''To
portray LaBorde as just a terrorist going around killing people would be
a mistake,'' said Stephen M. Latimer, a former lawyer with the program.
''I know him. And if he got to that point, it was based on a political
conclu-sion that his people were being betrayed and that the system
ain't changing.''
Mr. Gribetz, the Rockland County prosecutor, says he is ea-ger to avoid
a trial that attempts to put ''the system'' in the dock or that turns on
the politics of the defendants, who, apart from the charges of robbery
against them, face 25-year-to-life terms if convicted of second-degree
murder.
Miss Boudin, of all the accused, seems to be under the most pressure in
prison. According to several people who have seen her in recent weeks,
she is desperate to avoid long incarcera-tion. One visitor recalled
overhearing a conversation at Wood-bourne in which Miss Boudin, in
tears, implored Mr. Gilbert to help her.
I've got to get out of here, she was said to have pleaded.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Illustrations: photo of Nathaniel Burns (page B4) photo of
Donald Weems (page B4) photo of David J. Gilbert (page B4) photo of
Anthony LaBorde (page B4) photo of Katharine Boudin (page B4) photo of
Judith A Clark (page B4)
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company
26 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
May 17, 1982, Monday, AM cycle
Former Underground Radical Refuses To Talk To Brink's Grand Jury
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 285 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn refused Monday to
cooperate with a federal grand jury investi-gating last fall's bloody
Brink's robbery in Rockland County.
Miss Dohrn refused to comply with a subpoena requiring that she submit
samples of her handwriting.
After that refusal, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Parver had her brought
before U.S. District Judge Gerard L. Goettel to face contempt
proceedings.
However, because her lawyer submitted papers seeking to have the
subpoena quashed on various claims, Goettel delayed the hearing until
Wednesday morning.
Before her court appearance, Miss Dohrn held a news con-ference outside
the federal courthouse in Foley Square and said she had no intention of
cooperating with the grand jury.
Miss Dohrn denied any involvement whatsoever in the Brink's robbery, in
which three lawmen were killed. She de-nounced U.S. Attorney John S.
Martin Jr. and claimed the grand jury proceedings were illegal and a
"sham."
She said one purpose of the federal grand jury was to "facili-tate John
Martin's taking the Rockland County case away from local authorities."
She added that it was also designed to "pun-ish" her for her political
beliefs because it is well-known she would never cooperate with law
enforcement authorities.
"I am accused of no crime," Miss Dohrn said. "I am being jailed for my
silence. I will not be coerced into naming names."
Miss Dohrn, on the FBI's most-wanted list for more than four years, hid
out for 11 years while faced with criminal charges in connection with
the "Days of Rage" radical demon-strations in Chicago. She resurfaced in
1980, pleaded guilty to inciting mob action in Chicago and was put on
probation.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
27 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
May 17, 1982, Monday, AM cycle
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 359 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Bernardine Dohrn, a former Weather Underground mem-ber, said Monday she
would not cooperate with a grand jury in-vestigating a fatal Brink's
holdup believed staged by members of 1960s radical groups.
Her appearance before the grand jury, scheduled for Mon-day, was
postponed until Wednesday. A reason for the post-ponement was not known.
Miss Dohrn -- who went underground after being charged with assaulting a
police officer during the militant ''Days of Rage'' protest in Chicago
in 1969 -- told reporters she would not cooperate in the grand jury
investigation. If she refuses Wednesday, Miss Dohrn, who had been asked
for a sample of her handwriting, could be jailed for contempt of court.
''I am being jailed,'' she said, ''not for anything I have done but for
what I will not do: give the government information about my activities
or beliefs, friends and associates.''
The grand jury in U.S. District Court in Manhattan is look-ing into the
involvement of radical groups in the $1.6 million holdup of a Brink's
armored car in Rockland County last Oct. 20. Two police officers and a
guard were killed in the robbery and subsequent shootout.
Miss Dohrn voluntarily surrendered a little more than a year ago.
Katherine Boudin, who also was a member of the Weather Underground, is
in custody and awaiting trial in the Brink's holdup.
Two other key suspects in the case, Judith Clark and David Gilbert, also
have been identified as Weather Underground members. They and Miss
Boudin were arrested at a police roadblock in Nyack, a few miles from
the holdup scene.
Authroites have said Other radical groups were involved in the holdup,
including the Republic of New Afrika and the Black Liberation Army.
ln her statement to reporters, Miss Dohrn said, ''Since the events in
Nyack, the FBI has reinvented the Weather Under-ground.''
Now the mother of three children, Miss Dohrn said, ''I was not involved
in the Nyack events. However, many of the defen-dants are my friends and
I know them to be committed people.''
''My belief that the United States government is the greatest menace to
the people of the world has not changed,'' she said.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 U.P.I.
28 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
May 18, 1982, Tuesday, PM cycle
Dohrn Refusing to Cooperate in Brink's Investigation
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 183 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn is refusing to
cooperate with a grand jury investigating an ar-mored truck robbery that
left three police officers dead, calling the proceedings a "sham."
Miss Dohrn would not provide a requested handwriting sample and faces
contempt charges at a hearing Wednesday morning before U.S. District
Court Judge Gerard L. Goettel.
At a news conference Monday prior to her appearance in federal court,
Miss Dohrn denied any involvment in the aborted holdup that left three
lawmen dead. She condemned the probe as illegal and a "sham," and stated
that she would not co-operate with officials.
"I am accused of no crime," Miss Dohrn said. "I am being jailed for my
silence. I will not be coerced into naming names."
Miss Dohrn disappeared and hid out for 11 years while faced with
criminal charges in connection with the "Days of Rage" radical
demonstrations in Chicago. After being on the FBI's most-wanted list for
more than four years, she resurfaced in 1980, pleaded guilty to inciting
to mob action in Chicago and was put on probation.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
29 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
May 18, 1982, Tuesday, Late City Final Edition
Miss Dohrn Refusing To Aid Brink's Case
BYLINE: By The Associated Press
SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 144 words
Bernardine Dohrn, the former Weather Underground mem-ber, refused
yesterday to cooperate with a Federal grand jury investigating last
fall's fatal Brink's robbery in Rockland County.
After balking at a subpoena requiring samples of her hand-writing, Miss
Dohr was taken before Judge Gerard L. Goettel in Federal District Court
in Manhattan to face contempt proceed-ings. However, her lawyer moved to
have the subpoena quashed, and Judge Goettel delayed the contempt
hearing until tomorrow.
Before her court appearance, Miss Dohrn held a news con-ference outside
the United States Court House in Foley Square and denied any involvement
in the Brink's robbery, in which three lawmen were killed. She said she
had no intention of co-operating with the grand jury.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company
30 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
May 19, 1982, Wednesday, BC cycle
BYLINE: By JOHN F. RHODES
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 395 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A federal judge said Wednesday he will hold Bernadine Dohrn, former
member of the radical Weather Underground, in contempt if she refused to
give a handwriting sample to a grand jury.
The handwriting demand originates with a federal grand jury
investigation of a possible conspiracy of underground radicals in a
history of robberies,including the bungled Brinks robbery in Nyack, N.Y.
Oct. 20, in which two police officers and a pri-vate security guard were
killed.
Testimony in U.S. District Court in Manhattan indicated the government
wants the handwriting sample to see if Ms. Dohrn is linked to a
''serious crime other than the Brink's robbery,'' Judge Gerard L.
Goettel said before the grand jury hearing Wednesday.
The judge said the handwriting sample would have Ms. Dohrn write the
words, ''Martha K. Powell'' but neither he nor Assistant U.S. Attorney
Jane Parver would expand on the grand jury's demands.
''They (the government) can certainly tell her to write a name,'' the
judge said.
Ms. Dohrn reiterated her intention to refuse to cooperate with the grand
jury in any way.
''All the allegations against me are completely untrue,'' she said.
About 50 demonstrators, who called themselves members of the Coalition
to Defend the October 20 Freedom Fighters, ap-peared outside the
district court building Wednesday to protest the grand jury.
Her defense attorney, Michael Kennedy, said jailing Ms. Dohrn would hurt
her children and be a punitive measure rather than one aimed at coercing
her to cooperate.
Kennedy also argued that assisting the government was against Ms.
Dohrn's principles.
''The law does not recognize Ms. Dohrn's uncompromising principles,''
the judge said. ''She is not a country unto herself.''
He said that if Ms. Dohrn goes to jail for contempt, ''She has the key
to the jail in her hand.''
Miss Dohrn, who was initially to go before the grand jury Monday, is not
charged in the Brink's case.
Another former Weather Underground member and defen-dant in the Brink's
case, Judith Clark, is to appear in a police lineup today in Rockland
County where the bungled armored car heist occurred.
Miss Dohrn went underground after being charged with as-saulting a
police officer during the militant ''Days of Rage'' pro-test in Chicago
in 1969.
Miss Dohrn voluntarily surrendered to authorities a little more than a
year ago.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 U.P.I.
31 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
May 19, 1982, Wednesday, AM cycle
Two Plead Innocent to Bronx Robbery-Slaying
BYLINE: By JOHN SHANAHAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 572 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
In a courtroom guarded by shotgun-toting police, two men accused in the
bloody Brink's robbery in Rockland County pleaded innocent Wednesday to
a similar holdup-slaying in the Bronx.
Donald Weems, 35, of the Bronx, and Edward Lawrence Jo-sephs, 29, of
Manhattan, identified by the state as former Black Panthers, were
ordered held without bail.
In Manhattan, meanwhile, a former activist subpoenaed for the grand jury
investigation of the Rockland County robbery, in which two Nyack police
officers and a Brink's guard were killed, was jailed for contempt and
another prospective witness said he would not cooperate.
In the Bronx holdup, a Brink's truck was ambushed outside a Chase
Manhattan Bank branch. Three men jumped from a rented van and opened
fire on the armored truck's crew with an automatic rifle, a 9mm pistol
and a shotgun. One Brink's guard was killed and a second permanently
disabled. The robbers fled with $292,000.
"That truck was attacked by these two defendants and oth-ers," Assistant
District Attorney James Shalleck told Justice William Kapelman in the
Bronx state Supreme Court. "No words were exchanged. As the guards were
going about their duties, these two defendants opened fire without
saying a word."
Bronx District Attorney Mario Merola said the nine-count indictment
charged Weems and Josephs with murder, robbery and weapons possession.
He said participants in the Bronx and Rockland County holdups, plus one
in Danbury, Conn., in March 1980 and an-other in Inwood on Long Island
in April 1979 were members of the Black Liberation Army and the Weather
Underground.
Weems has been indicted on state charges of robbery and murder for the
Rockland County robbery; Josephs, as "Edward L. Joseph" has been
indicted on federal charges of being a gunman in that robbery. Merola's
office said Joseph and Jo-sephs are the same man.
Merola said a third suspect in the Bronx killing, Samuel Smith, was
slain in a shoot-out with police in Queens last Oct. 23, a few days
after the Rockland County robbery.
Merola said more indictments were expected in the case.
Lawrence Fogelman, representing Weems, contended that the state's case
"is tenuous at best" against the two in the Bronx robbery-slaying. He
said only one witness had picked out Jo-sephs from a photograph.
In federal court in Manhattan, meanwhile, former Weather Underground
member Bernardine Dohrn was cited for con-tempt and jailed by a federal
judge for refusing to provide sam-ples of her handwriting to the federal
grand jury.
Miss Dohrn, who hid out for 11 years before she surfaced in 1980 to face
charges of inciting rioting during the 1968 Democ-ratic Convention in
Chicago, was jailed after a hearing before U.S. District Judge Gerard
Goettel.
She was subpoenaed before the federal grand jury on Mon-day and refused
to comply with its request for handwriting samples. On Wednesday she was
given another opportunity to comply. Goettel told her she could refuse
to give testimony without being held in contempt, but could not refuse
to provide the handwriting samples.
Miss Dohrn was sent to the Metropolitan Correctional Cen-ter for not
more than 18 months or until she decides to comply.
Dr. Alan Berkman, who described himself as a resident at Lincoln
Hospital, at a news conference said he had been sub-poenaed but would
refuse to comply.
Berkman acknowledged having treated several people linked to the Brink's
robbery.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
32 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
May 20, 1982, Thursday, Late City Final Edition
2 ARE CHARGED IN A 2D HOLDUP OF A BRINK'S CAR
BYLINE: By MARCIA CHAMBERS
SECTION: Section B; Page 12, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 390 words
Two men charged in the Brink's armored-car robbery in Rockland County
last October were indicted yesterday in an earlier Brink's robbery in
the Bronx.
A Brink's guard and two police officers were killed in the Rockland
robbery. The Bronx robbery, which took place near Co-op City on June 2,
1981, left one Brink's guard dead and another permanently disabled.
The two accused men - Donald Weems, 35 years old, of the Bronx, and
Edward Joseph, 29, of Manhattan -were defendants a decade ago in the
so-called Black Panther 21 trial, which ended in acquittal. They pleaded
not guilty yesterday in the Brink's case before Justice William Kapelman
in State Su-preme Court and were returned to jail. Outside the
courtroom, police sharpshooters with rifles were on guard.
Miss Dohrn Jailed for Contempt
Meanwhile in United States District Court in Manhattan, a judge jailed
Bernardine Dohrn, a former member of the Weather Underground, for
contempt for refusing to give a handwriting sample to a Federal grand
jury investigating radical conspiracies. The grand jury is looking into
a series of robberies and other crimes by suspects it believes are
connected to the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. Miss
Dohrn was ordered to jail until she cooperates or until the grand jury's
18-month-term expires.
''I will not cooperate,'' she said and waved goodbye to her young
children as she was led out of court. The prosecutors apparently want
the handwriting sample to see if Miss Dohrn is linked to a ''serious
crime other than the Brink's robbery.'' They asked her to write the
words Martha K. Powell, and she refused.
Mr. Joseph has been indicted by the same Federal grand jury on
conspiracy charges, and Mr. Weems has been indicted by another state
grand jury in the Rockland Brink's case.
Mario Merola, the Bronx District Attorney, said there were striking
similiaries between the Rockland and Bronx robberies. '' In both cases,
without uttering a word, the assailants opened fire,'' he said. ''It was
an unprovoked execution.'' The defendants are also accused of taking
$292,000 from the Brink's guards. The money has not been recovered.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Illustrations: photo of an armed correction officer
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company
33 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
May 20, 1982, Thursday, PM cycle
Two Plead Innocent to Bronx Brink's Heist
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 466 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Two men accused in the bloody holdup of a Brink's ar-mored car in
suburban New York City last October in which three people were killed
have pleaded innocent to another Brink's holdup-slaying four months
earlier.
Donald Weems, 35, of the Bronx, and Edward Lawrence Jo-sephs, 29, of
Manhattan, were ordered held without bail after entering the pleas
Wednesday in state Supreme Court in the Bronx.
They were charged in a nine-count indictment with murder, robbery and
weapons possession in connection with the June 1981 holdup outside a
Chase Manhattan Bank branch in the Bronx.
A federal judge in Manhattan, meanwhile, cited former Weather
Underground member Bernardine Dohrn for contempt and ordered her jailed
for refusing to provide handwriting sam-ples to a federal grand jury
investigating a radical conspiracy in the October holdup in Rockland
County.
In the Bronx holdup, one Brink's guard was killed and an-other was
permanently disabled. The gunmen escaped with $292,000.
Weems also has been indicted on state charges of robbery and murder for
the botched $1.6 million Rockland County heist Oct. 20 and Josephs, also
known as Edward L. Joseph, has been indicted on federal charges of being
one of the gunmen in that robbery, in which one Brink's guard and two
Nyack policemen were killed.
In both the Bronx and the Rockland County Brink's heists, "without
uttering a word, the assailants opened fire," said Bronx District
Attorney Mario Merola. "It was an unprovoked execu-tion," he said.
A third suspect in the Bronx robbery, Samuel Smith, was slain in a
Queens shoot-out with police three days after the Rockland robbery.
Merola said both Weems and Josephs were former Black Panthers. He said
more indictments were expected in the case.
Security was tight at the Bronx courthouse where shotgun-toting guards
patrolled the corridors and visitors were searched.
Miss Dohrn, who was underground for 11 years before re-surfacing in 1980
to face charges of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in
Chicago, was subpoenaed by the grand jury Monday but refused to comply
with its request that she submit a sample of her handwriting.
"I will not cooperate," she said and waved goodbye to her young children
as she was led to jail.
U.S. District Judge Gerard Goettel told Miss Dohrn she could refuse to
give testimony but could not refuse to provide the samples.
She was sent to the Metropolitan Correctional Center for a maximum of 18
months or until she complies.
Dr. Alan Berkman, who said he is a resident at Lincoln Hos-pital,
disclosed outside the Manhattan courthouse that he also has been
subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury.
Berkman, who said he treated several people linked to the Brink's
robbery, said he would not cooperate when called on Monday.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
34 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
May 20, 1982, Thursday, PM cycle
World News Summary
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 70 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Former Weather Underground member Bernardine Dohrn, jailed for refusing
to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the $1.6 million Brink's
holdup, says her decision to go to jail was ''quite difficult.''
Ms. Dohrn, 40, a mother of two, told a judge Wednesday she hoped her
decision not to cooperate with ''government ille-gality, lies and
misconduct'' would help ''our children ... grow up in a better world.''
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 U.P.I.
35 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
May 20, 1982 Thursday
AROUND THE WORLD Ex-radical jailed
BYLINE: GAM
LENGTH: 100 words
DATELINE: New York NY
NEW YORK - Bernadine Dohrn, once a leader of the radi-cal Weather
Underground, was jailed for contempt of court yesterday after refusing
to
give a federal grand jury a sample of her handwriting. The grand jury is
investigating last October's robbery of a Brink's van in subur-ban New
York
by Weather Underground members and the Black Liberation Army, another
radical group. Two policemen and a security guard were killed in the
robbery. U.S. District Court Judge Gerard Goettel ordered Miss Dohrn
sent
to jail until she either agrees to provide the handwriting sam-ples or
the
grand jury completes its term.
LOAD-DATE: January 12, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 1982 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licen-sors
All Rights Reserved
36 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
May 23, 1982, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Headliners;
Returning the Favor
SECTION: Section 4; Page 11, Column 3; Week in Review Desk
LENGTH: 141 words
As a member of the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn made no secret
of the contempt in which she held the Government. Last week, the
Government held her in contempt, sending her to jail for refusing to
furnish a handwriting sample to a grand jury probing last year's Brink's
shootout in Rockland County and other robberies. Though a stretch behind
bars was ''quite difficult'' - she has two children - the former
fugitive said she was determined to protest ''government illegality,
lies and misconduct.'' Going public in 1980 after 11 years in hiding,
Miss Dohrn got three years probation for her role in violent
demonstrations. This time, she could be jailed for 18 months, unless she
changes her mind or the grand jury is dismissed first.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Illustrations: photo of Bernadine Dohrn
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company
37 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
May 26, 1982, Wednesday, PM cycle
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 286 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A doctor who authorities say treated one of the suspects in the $1.6
million Brink's robbery was ordered to appear today before a federal
grand jury investigating the holdup, in which two cops and a secuirty
guard were killed.
Dr. Alan Berkman, who works in an out-patient clinic at Lincoln
Hospital, was told Tuesday at a hearing in U.S. District Court in
Manhattan to return today to make his grand jury ap-pearance.
Lisa Roth, a spokeswoman for the John Brown Anti-Klan Committee, said
Berkman, who is a member of that group, in-tends to refuse to cooperate
with the grand jury.
If he refuses to cooperate, he could be cited for contempt of court and
ordered jailed for the duration of the grand jury.
Bernardine Dohrn, a former radical fugitive who surren-dered last year,
was sent to prison last week for refusing to co-operate with the grand
jury.
The panel is investigating a possible conspiracy between radical groups
in the Brink's holdup.
Berkman's lawyers contend the federal government is using their client
to get information on the whereabouts of Marilyn Jean Buck, a fugitive
and accused conspirator in the case.
Authorities said Berkman was at a ''safe house'' in Mount Vernon, N.Y.,
following the Oct. 20 robbery in Nanuet, N.Y., and treated Ms. Buck, the
only white member of the Black Lib-eration Army.
Authorities believe she was wounded in the $1.6 million robbery and
subsequent shootout.
Ms. Roth said Berkman also treated Samuel Brown, who is charged with
murder in the Brink's holdup.
Police have said they believe the Brink's robbery is part of a series of
armored car holdups carried out by the remnants of the radical Weather
Underground and the Black Liberation Army.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 U.P.I.
38 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
May 27, 1982, Thursday, PM cycle ###
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 242 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A doctor who treated a suspect in the $1.6 million Brink's robbery was
in jail today for refusing to cooperate with a jury investigating the
holdup, in which two cops and a security guard were killed.
Dr. Alan Berkman, who works in an out-patient clinic at Lincoln
Hospital, defied a court order Wednesday to provide the jurors with
photographs and handwriting samples.
He was ordered jailed for the duration of the grand jury's term -- a
maximum of 18 months -- or until he cooperates.
Bernardine Dohrn, a former radical fugitive who surren-dered last year,
was jailed last week for refusing to testify be-fore the grand jury.
The panel is investigating a possible conspiracy in the Oct. 20, 1981,
Brink's holdup between such radical groups as the Weather Underground
and the Black Liberation Army.
Two police officers and a Brink's guard were killed in the bungled
holdup in Rockland County. The $1.6 million was re-covered.
Berkman's lawyers contend the government is trying to get information on
the whereabouts of Marilyn Jean Buck, a fugi-tive and accused
conspirator in the case.
Authorities said Berkman was at a ''safe house'' in Mount Vernon, N.Y.,
following the robbery and treated Ms. Buck, the only white member of the
Black Liberation Army. Authorities said she was wounded in the shootout.
A spokesman for Berkman said the physician treated Samuel Brown, charged
with murder in the Brink's holdup, after Brown was jailed.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 U.P.I.
39 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
July 24, 1982 Saturday
Upper West Side story It's still the Big Apple's literary core but the
trendies keep nibbling away
BYLINE: ROBERT EDWARD BROWN; GAM
LENGTH: 1613 words
DATELINE: New York NY
BY ROBERT EDWARD BROWN
NEW YORK
A
LFRED KAZIN, the literary critic who wrote New York Jew, once remarked
that New York City has been the single most important factor in American
literature. Before the Second World War, his observation could have fit
only one of the city's neighborhoods - Greenwich Village. But, since
then,
another neighborhood has assumed the preeminent place in the city's
literary life. It's called the Upper West Side.
A rough geographical definition hints at why. The Manhat-tan
neighborhood is bounded at the north and south by two of the city's most
substantial cultural institutions, Columbia University and the Lincoln
Centre for the Performing Arts.
The adjective "upper" refers to the fact that the area lies north of
Central Park South, whereas much of Manhattan's West Side is south of
this
dividing line. The neighborhood is west of Central Park, Man-hattan's
fundamental east-west boundary, and east of the Hudson River, which
supposedly separates sophisticated New York from provincial America.
Newspaper tabloids have made the Upper West Side famous - and infamous
- for nonliterary reasons. John Lennon was gunned down here. Patty
Hearst
was hidden away here, and celebrity radical Weatherpersons such as
Bernadette Dohrn and Jane Alpert lived, shopped and even worked in the
neighborhood, anonymously or not. (The politically liberal sympathies of
the area make it an attractive hideout for nonconformists.)
But even with the splashy violence and radical chic, there is genuine
literary history on the Upper West Side. (Jack Abbott, inciden-tally,
stabbed to death an unfortunate waiter not on the Upper West Side but
the
Lower East Side.) The names of Upper West Side writers make a pantheon
of
American literature: Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe (who wrote The
Raven in an apartment on what is now 84th Street and Broad-way), Edith
Wharton, Sara Teasdale, Edna Ferber and Sinclair Lewis.
Distinguished visitors have included William Butler Yeats who,
according to a book called Literary New York, came for a short while in
1903, staying in an apartment where he produced a poem called Never Give
All the Heart.
Garcia Lorca was another visitor. His volume of poems, Poet in New
York, beautifully recalls his stay in the 1929. Gertrude Stein had an
Upper West Side flat in 1902. Herman Wouk wrote Marjorie Morningstar on
Central Park West. Theodore Dreiser rented an apartment in 1899 on 102nd
Street, a brisk walk from Columbia on the brink of the pro-gressive era
of
John Dewey.
Flamboyance has been plentiful on this side of town. The year the stock
market crashed - 1929 - Harry Crosby, a poet whose bizarre tastes and
moderate talents were somehow representative of his era, committed
suicide
with his girl friend in the Hotel des Artistes on West 67th Street
(today
there is a cafe there by that name). That establishment also housed, for
a
time, other literary and cultural celebrities, including Noel Coward and
Isadora Duncan, vastly dissimilar artists who, one might add, could
hardly
be found paired in any other way than as names in a hotel reg-ister.
For all this prewar literary glamor, it wasn't until the 1950s that the
Upper West Side had its heyday, when Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Allen
Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling and others were at work in the neighborhood.
(Bellow, ironically, quit New York for Chicago where he could be free of
what he has said were stultifying literary cliques.)
The rise of the clique that came to be called "the New York Jewish
literary intelligentsia" - Trilling, art critics Harold Rosenberg and
Clement Greenberg ("college of the Bergs"), and other writers for the
Partisan Review - may have been responsible for historian Loren Baritz's
recent description: "New York is vital, energetic, frenzied, rude,
pushy,
sophisticated, elegant, shabby, provincial, cosmopolitan, mori-bund,
Jewish, corrupt, filthy and magnificent."
Whether the neighborhood is "Jewish," it is certainly not moribund - at
least not according to The Wall Street Journal, which explained why Feb.
1
in a front-page story titled: Urban Uplift - Youthful Profes-sionals
Without Any Children Transform City Areas. Beneath that, a further
heading
explained that New York's Upper West Wide Gets Glittery New Shops - and
Doubling of Rents.
It seems a controversial phenomenon known as "gentrifica-tion" is
turning parts of the "ethnically mixed" neighborhood of Beaux Arts
hotels
and brownstone walkups into an "upscale" land of expensive co-operative
apartments - and quiche shops.
A stylish and witty book titled Bachelorhood describes the rites of
gentrification in some depth. Author Philip Lopate observes that one
West
Side avenue - transformed by what he calls "quiche blight" - is now a
"Via
Veneto for swells and near swells . . . It is no longer possible to
carry
groceries home without stumbling over the pointy shoe of some magazine-
cover type watching passersby with a glass of white wine in one hand at
an
outdoor table."
What bothers writers more than hedonism is the threat of eviction from
the swift trend to convert low-rent apartment buildings into high-price
co-ops where two-bedroom flats may command $150,000 on the open market.
Postwar rent controls have been undermined by inflation and speculation.
Better heeled and more established writers such as Jules Feiffer,
Joseph Heller and Erica Jong - all reputed to be occupying West Side
apartments - may be more able to stand the financial shock of
gentrification. One apparently permanent resident is Isaac Bashevis
Singer, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1979. Now 78, Singer
has
told reporters that he's lived longer on the West Side than he did in
his
native Poland, and that he sometimes gives his Polish shtetl stories a
West Side setting, and vice-versa. Singer escapes the bitter cold
winters
by heading south to Miami.
But even "blighted" by quiche shops and co-operatives, the West Side is
likely to continue attracting literary intellectuals. (Where else could
Woody Allen have made Annie Hall?)
Broadway above Lincoln Centre offers what writers require: the best
literary bookstores, revival moviehouses, stationery stores, day-care
centres for their kids, Chinese laundries for their shirts, pizza places
that deliver and superb bagels - not to mention Lincoln Centre's
symphony,
opera and theatre.
Pete Martin, who owns what is widely regarded here as the finest of the
literary bookstores, the New Yorker on 89th off Broadway, ac-tually
cares
enough to stock and promote resident writers' books. A writer would have
to be mad to live in another part of town.
Sadly, there is much actual madness in the streets, though not the
wild-wacky-and-wonderful variety.
Joel Kovel, a psychiatrist who works and lives in the Broadway area
above 72nd Street, uses the word "brutal" to describe the neighborhood.
"It's harsh, full of rough edges, full of misery and madness - not the
kind you can romanticize, but people sitting on Broadway, to-tally
deteriorated."
Kovel's most recent book, The Age of Desire, puts much of the blame on
capitalism's failure of heart. Laws that "de-institutionalized" the
population of New York State's mental asylums in the 1970s turned
Broadway
above 72nd into a mean street where a number of anguished, angry,
muttering and forlorn men and women wander about, occa-sionally creating
a
medieval scene and frightening tourists.
If West Siders are less frightened, perhaps, it is because they
recognize the relatively small and familiar cast of crazies. There's one
man, for example, who picks the absolutely worst winter days and nights
to
sit in front of Broadway storefronts beating on an old set of drums with
neither any apparent sense of rhythm, nor much interest in cadging
change
from passersby.
The rhythmless drummer could not afford the services of the many
psychiatrists who, in the past generation, have moved to the West Side,
attracted by apartments spacious enough for both their families and
professional offices. (Local myth says they followed psychia-try dean
Harry Stack Sullivan here.)
Writers moved from the smaller-scale apartments of Green-wich Village to
the West Side for similar reasons. Unlike their literary prede-cessors,
the
generation of postwar writers tended to produce both children and books,
a
combination requiring apartments that were then both available and
affordable.
Will the Upper West Side become the Upper Class West Side? Will writers
and other intellectuals move to Brooklyn en masse or - God forbid - to
New
Jersey? It is impossible to predict. But the Upper West Side remains
"rude, pushy and magnificent," despite its current economic
metamorphosis.
There is still a geist that feeds and protects the writer - a rare
combination of city stimulation and privacy some find essential to the
creative process.
Cities change, and so do their neighborhoods. It is probably
historically shortsighted to equate that change with destruction. Nor is
it likely that the West Side will become very much like the East Side
(read Park Avenue), which is far less heterogeneous in its population,
and
more obviously dominated by a non-literary business class.
But even if gentrification does deliver some writers into the clutches
of Brooklyn, it can never banish the true immortals of the place -
Holden
Caulfield, Moses Herzog, Sister Carrie, Marjorie Morningstar, Jules
Feiffer's cartoon neurotics. All of them seem inseparable from their
Upper
West Side neighborhood.
Some writers may leave the West Side, but literature itself will
remain, because writers have done more than inhabit the place - they've
created a unique, urban fictional landscape, which is beyond
gentrification.
LOAD-DATE: January 12, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 1982 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licen-sors
All Rights Reserved
40 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
July 25, 1982, Sunday, BC cycle
Brink's Robbery Led To Wider Probe of Radicals
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 852 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Code-named the "Big Dance," the robbery was planned as a triumphant
battle in the war a band of black revolutionaries and white radicals saw
themselves waging against the authorities.
Instead, the $1.6 million bloody Brink's heist in Rockland County last
Oct. 20 was a massacre that sparked a massive fed-eral probe into what
the FBI says is a larger terrorist conspir-acy.
Involved in the alleged conspiracy, say FBI affidavits, are at least 17
people _ including former members of the Weather Underground, soldiers
of the Black Liberation Army, associates of a Harlem acupuncture clinic
and black separatists who may be tied to the Puerto Rican terrorist
group FALN.
The targets of the investigation say the FBI is waging a witch hunt
against them for their radical beliefs and associa-tions.
But as prosecutors gird for what could be one of the longest criminal
trials in U.S. history _ defense lawyers say as long as a year _ new
details have emerged about the Brink's case and those who to date have
been only peripheral figures to it.
They include a physician the FBI says is a member of the May 19th
Communist Organization, a Bronx paralegal worker, a former New Left
activist and former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn.
Those four and two others are in jail on contempt charges for refusing
to cooperate with a federal grand jury investigating the holdup in
Nanuet, in which a Brink's guard was killed, and the ensuing shootout at
a roadblock in Nyack, in which two po-lice officers died. None of the
six is charged in the case itself.
Ms. Dohrn appeared to express their sentiments when she said in a recent
television interview from prison that she "couldn't live with myself" if
she cooperated with the authori-ties.
But new information in U.S. District Court papers discloses that the FBI
says it has evidence that Ms. Dohrn and the others may be more deeply
involved in the case than previously por-trayed.
Among the previously undisclosed allegations made by the court papers:
Ms. Dohrn, while clerking at a Broadway clothing store, personally
handled a driver's license that a customer used for identification.
Information from that license was used to obtain a duplicate license
that was used to rent a car used in a $500,000 robbery on Long Island in
which at least one person accused in the Brink's robbery is a suspect.
Four months after the Brink's robbery-murders, Ms. Dohrn met with
Marilyn Jean Buck, a fugitive indicted in the case. The papers allege
that Ms. Dohrn now knows the whereabouts of Ms. Buck, the only white
member of the Black Liberation Army.
Dr. Alan Berkman, a physician now in jail for refusing to cooperate with
the grand jury, treated Ms. Buck for gunshot wounds she sustained in the
robbery. An FBI informant said Ms. Buck shot herself in the leg during
"the panic at the police roadblock in Nyack."
But Kenneth Walton, head of an FBI task force investigating the case,
said in a earlier interview that members of the group that pulled the
Brink's robbery had been "robbing banks since 1976" to finance their
activities.
The alleged terrorists appear to regard the money as right-fully theirs,
according to a statement from the "Coalition to De-fend the October 20th
Freedom Fighters" which called the rob-bery-murders an "attempted
expropriation of the Brink's truck in Nyack, N.Y."
Backgrounds of the Brink's circle include past brushes with the law.
Several of the indicted Brink's suspects are former Black Panthers
acquitted in an alleged plot 10 years ago to bomb a po-lice station and
department stores. Safe houses used by the Brink's robbers contained
diagrams of New York police sta-tions and a Queens jail.
Before the Brink's robbery, former Weather Underground member Kathy
Boudin was being sought after she fled from an explosion 12 years ago at
a Greenwich Village brownstone apartment police said was used by the
radicals as a bomb fac-tory.
Others, like Judith Clark, were active in anti-war protests. Ms. Clark
served a nine-month jail term in the "Days of Rage" protests in 1969 in
Chicago. She was also the target of an ear-lier FBI probe in which
agents were accused of intercepting her mail.
These and others under investigation say they are being per-secuted for
their radical views _ not for refusing to testify or provide the grand
jury with handwriting and hair samples to compare with wigs and
documents possibly connected to the Brink's robbery.
Berkman called the Brink's suspects "freedom fighters" and told U.S.
District Judge Gerard L. Goettel that the grand jury was being used as a
"tool of political repression" to crush the struggle for black rights.
Ms. Fula, who is involved in a task force dedicated to "ex-pose the
racism and hypocrisy of the policies of the U.S. Gov-ernment," has
charged authorities with conducting a "witchhunt to ferret out political
dissidents."
Goettel rejected those contentions in jailing those who re-fused to
cooperate with the grand jury.
"The facts of the matter ... bely any such conclusion," Goet-tel said.
"Bank robbery and murder will always be acts of ter-rorism."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
ADVANCED-DATE: July 23, 1982, Friday, BC cycle
Copyright 1982 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
41 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
August 9, 1982, Monday, Late City Final Edition
PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THE CASE
SECTION: Section B; Page 5, Column 2; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 345 words
The Brink's case, which is moving toward a scheduled Sept. 13 opening of
pretrial proceedings in Rockland County, prom-ises to be an unusually
complex prosecution. Seven arrested suspects, all of whom have pleaded
not guilty, face state charges of robbery and homicide carrying combined
prison sen-tences of 50 years to life for each defendant. An eighth
remains a fugitive.
Three others, including one man who is still at large, have been
indicted on Federal charges of bank robbery and racket-eering and face a
separate trial, which is to begin in September.
Four of the homicide suspects were arrested near the site of the
robbery. They were Katherine Boudin, Judith A. Clark and David J.
Gilbert - identified by the Federal Bureau of Investi-gation as members
of the Weather Underground - and Samuel Brown, whom the F.B.I. said it
believed was affiliated with the Black Liberation Army. Four others said
to be members of the Black Liberation Army were later indicted -Anthony
N. La-Borde, Donald Weems, Nathaniel Burns and Marilyn Jean Buck. All
but Miss Buck were apprehended; she remains a fugi-tive. Another
suspect, Samuel Smith, was killed in a shootout with the police in
Queens last Oct. 23.
The Federal indictments named three men, Edward Law-rence Joseph,
identified by the F.B.I. as a member of the Black Panther Party, and
Cecil Ferguson and Mutulu Shakur, de-scribed by the F.B.I. as members of
the Republic of New Af-rika. The first two are in custody; Mr. Shakur is
being sought as a fugitive and has been added to the F.B.I.'s list of 10
most-wanted persons.
In addition, seven witnesses have been imprisoned on con-tempt charges
for refusing to submit to Federal grand jury sub-poenas requesting
testimony or samples of hair or handwriting. They are Eve Rosahn, Alan
Berkman, Bernardine Dohrn, Yaasmyn D. Fula, Jerry Gaines, Shahim Abdul
Jabbar and Rene Thornton. An eighth subpoenaed witness, Cynthia Bos-ton,
is being sought.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company
42 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
December 24, 1982, Friday, Late City Final Edition
FUNDS FROM ACCORD ON A SUIT GO TO BAIL FOR A BRINK'S SUSPECT
BYLINE: By The Associated Press
SECTION: Section B; Page 6, Column 4; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 366 words
A 1978 civil suit in which eight political radicals charged that they
had been subjected to illegal Federal surveillance has been settled,
officials said yesterday. The eight plaintiffs in-clude two figures in
the Brink's armored-car holdup and kill-ings in Rockland County, Judith
A. Clark and Eve Rosahn.
At a hearing yesterday before a United States magistrate, three of the
plaintiffs testified that they had received $15,000 apiece as part of
the settlement, and that they had used the money to help raise bail for
a woman indicted on Federal charges in the Brink's case. Officials said
the suit was settled Oct. 5.
Yesterday's hearing was held by the magistrate, Leonard Bernikow, to
determine if $300,000 raised to post bail for the indicted woman, Silvia
Baraldini, had come from legitimate sources.
One of the witnesses at the hearing was Miss Rosahn, who had been jailed
for contempt for refusing to cooperate with a Federal grand jury
investigating the Brink's holdup. The other two witnesses were Dana
Bieberman and Natalee Rosenstein. The remaining plaintiffs in the suit
were Jennifer Dohrn, Jane Spielman, Judy Greenberg and Franklin Apfel.
U.S. Motion Is Denied
Officials said after the hearing that Miss Clark, who faces trial in
Orange County on state charges in the Brink's case, had settled the
civil action without receiving any payment, and that the remaining seven
plaintiffs had settled for $15,000 each.
The magistrate overruled efforts by Federal prosecutors to prevent the
bail from being posted yesterday. Government prosecutors appealed to
Judge John E. Sprizzo of Federal Dis-trict Court in Manhattan, urging
that he reverse the magistrate's decision.
The judge denied the motion and allowed Susan V. Tipog-raph, a lawyer
who employs Miss Baraldini, to post bail on the condition that Miss
Baraldini report in person to the United States Attorney's office every
day over the holiday weekend.
Federal prosecutors indicated they would renew their appeal on Monday.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1982 The New York Times Company
43 of 74 DOCUMENTS
In the Matter of the Subpoena Served Upon Ber-nardine DOHRN
No. M-11-188
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
560 F. Supp. 179; 1983 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 20281
January 4, 1983
SUBSEQUENT HISTORY: [**1] As Amended January 5, 1983.
CASE SUMMARY:
PROCEDURAL POSTURE: Movant witness was found in contempt of court
because of her refusal to comply with the court's order to provide a
sample of her handwriting to a federal grand jury. Before the court was
her motion to vacate the con-tempt order.
OVERVIEW: The grand jury was investigating an armored car robbery and
had requested the writing sample to determine whether the witness had
forged a signature on an application for a duplicate driver's license.
When her motion to quash the sub-poena was denied and she still refused
to supply the writing sample, she was found in contempt. The witness's
self-serving statement that she would not cooperate could not, of
itself, be considered to determine whether the court should continue to
enforce the order of civil contempt. However, the court found that this
was a case proper for it to exercise its discretionary power to release
the witness. First, it became increasingly clear that the witness's
recalcitrance would continue and that further incarceration would not
compel her to cooperate. Second, the importance of her handwriting
exemplars had diminished over time. Despite the witness's recalcitrance,
the grand jury investi-gation proceeded apace, and a number of
indictments were re-turned. Third, the government had found enough
handwriting examples in its own files to make the exemplar unnecessary.
OUTCOME: The court modified the order of contempt and di-rected that the
witness be released from jail.
CORE TERMS: handwriting, exemplar, grand jury, signature, incarceration,
cooperate, contempt, robbery, criminal activity, hair, questioned,
forged, handwriting samples, vacate, jail, specimens, grand jury,
subpoenaed, contemnor's, vacated, driver's license, questionable,
spontaneous, indictment, order requiring, contempt order, refusal to
comply, civil contempt, recalcitrant witness, fingerprinting
LexisNexis(R) Headnotes
Civil Procedure > Remedies > Injunctions > Contempt
Civil Procedure > Sanctions > Contempt > Civil Contempt
[HN1] A contemnor's self-serving statement that he or she will not
cooperate should not, by itself, be considered by courts in determining
whether to impose or continue to enforce an order of civil contempt.
Civil Procedure > Remedies > Injunctions > Contempt
Civil Procedure > Sanctions > Contempt > Civil Contempt
[HN2] Except in unusual circumstances, courts should not con-clude that,
as a matter cognizable under due process, confine-ment for civil
contempt that has not yet reached the eighteen-month limit of 28 U.S.C.S.
§ 1826 has nonetheless lost its coer-cive impact and become punitive.
Civil Procedure > Remedies > Injunctions > Contempt
[HN3] The court retains the power to release a recalcitrant wit-ness
whenever it concludes that further incarceration will not cause the
witness to testify. When it becomes obvious that sanc-tions are not
going to compel compliance, they lose their reme-dial characteristics
and take on more of the nature of punish-ment. Moreover, the court
retains the ability to determine the length of incarceration in light
of, not only the apparent lack of effect of incarceration, but also the
surrounding circumstances and the need for the witness's evidence.
COUNSEL: John S. Martin, Jr., U.S. Atty., S.D.N.Y., New York, New York,
for the United States of America by Robert S. Litt and Stacey J. Moritz,
Asst. U.S. Attys., New York, New York, of counsel.
Michael Kennedy, Joseph Calluori, Michael Kennedy, P.C., New York, New
York, for Bernardine Dohrn.
JUDGES: Goettel, District Judge.
OPINION BY: GOETTEL
OPINION
[*179] MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
GOETTEL, District Judge.
On May 19, 1982, this Court found Bernardine Dohrn 1 in con-tempt of
court because of her refusal to comply with the Court's order to provide
a sample of her handwriting to a federal grand jury. She was ordered
confined pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1826 until she complied with the
Court's order. Before this Court is Dohrn's motion to vacate the
contempt order.
1 Dohrn had been a member of the Weather Underground and was, for a
number of years, a fugitive living under-ground. She has been publically
associated with a number of extreme political causes.
The grand jury investigation that underlies [**2] this motion resulted
from a violent armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, New
York on October 20, 1981. (The perpe-trators stole $1.6 million,
murdered a Brinks guard, and during their escape, which was aided by
several confederates, mur-dered two more policemen.) Thus far, the
investigation has un-covered a widespread criminal conspiracy to commit
armed [*180] robberies, murders, prison escapes, and other crimes. It
has also led to the indictment of eleven persons, including four
fugitives.
One of the crimes under investigation by the grand jury is a one-half
million dollar armored car robbery that occurred in Inwood, New York in
April, 1980. According to the Govern-ment, "the evidence before the
grand jury suggests that Dohrn, then employed as a salesperson at a
Manhattan store, obtained for the conspirators driver's license
information that was used fraudulently to obtain a duplicate driver's
license which, in turn, was used to rent a station wagon [that was used
in the rob-bery]." Affidavit of Robert Litt para. 3. 2 In an effort to
deter-mine whether Dohrn had forged the signature on the applica-tion
for a duplicate driver's license, the grand jury subpoenaed [**3] Dohrn
on May 13, 1982, to provide handwriting exem-plars.
2 Although it was initially suggested that Dohrn might have been an
active participant in the robbery, the Gov-ernment now merely suggests
that, at the least, she might have been an unwitting facilitator of the
criminal activity.
Dohrn moved to quash the subpoena on May 17, 1982. The Court, however,
denied her motion and ordered her to comply. When she refused, the Court
held her in contempt.
Dohrn has been confined at the Metropolitan Correctional Cen-ter (MCC)
for seven months. 3 Throughout this time, she has remained adamant in
her refusal to furnish handwriting exem-plars or to cooperate with the
grand jury in any way. Indeed, two of the nation's leading attorneys,
persons with no sympathy for her political views, have described
Bernardine Dohrn as a person having "a view of the law and a view of
life and her rights and obligations that is myopic, convoluted,
unrealistic, childish, and inexplicable." They have also concluded that
"Bernardine Dohrn [**4] is intractable in her views and beliefs to the
point of fanaticism [and] may well perceive herself as a second Joan of
Arc[,] now suffering an ordeal that must be en-dured for the causes she
believes in, whatever they might be." 4 She now moves to vacate the
contempt order because there is no probability that further
incarceration will compel her coop-eration.
3 Dohrn was, however, granted a two-day furlough to get married.
4 Affidavit of Don H. Reuben of Chicago, concurred in by the Honorable
Harold R. Tyler, Jr.
It should also be noted that, immediately following Dohrn's
imprisonment, a letter writing campaign on her behalf was apparently
launched, and this Court received scores of letters from people who
share Dohrn's political beliefs, condemning her incarceration and
claiming that it was for purposes of political persecution. (The pattern
of all the letters indicated that the contents had been sug-gested by a
form letter.) This Court notes, however, that it sees no indication
whatever that Dohrn is being held as a political prisoner or persecuted
in any way.
More recently, the Court has received many letters from attorneys,
predominantly those associated with liberal causes, who have proclaimed
that Dohrn will never coop-erate with the grand jury and, consequently,
her incarcera-tion is serving no compulsive purpose and has become
punitive in nature. These attorneys have concluded, with-out having
heard the other side of the case, that Dohrn has no meaningful
information and that her refusal to give the handwriting exemplars is
simply a matter of principle. It has been this Court's experience that
most of those who claim that their refusal to comply with grand jury
demands is a "matter of principle" are usually co-conspirators
at-tempting to conceal their own criminal involvement.
[**5] At the outset, two points should be made. First, [HN1] a
contemnor's self-serving statement that he or she will not co-operate
should not, by itself, be considered by courts in deter-mining whether
to impose or continue to enforce an order of civil contempt. If it were,
very few persons could ever be com-pelled to testify or cooperate. See
United States v. Dien, 598 F.2d 743, 745 (2d Cir.1979). Second, [HN2]
except in unusual circumstances, courts should not conclude "that, as a
matter cognizable under due process, confinement for civil contempt that
has not yet reached the eighteen-month limit [of 28 U.S.C. § 1826] has
nonetheless lost its coercive impact and become punitive." In re Grand
Jury Investigation (Braun), 600 F.2d 420, 427 (3d Cir.1979) (footnote
omitted).
[*181] Be that as it may, [HN3] the Court still retains the power to
release a recalcitrant witness whenever it concludes that further
incarceration will not cause the witness to testify. See In re Grand
Jury Investigation (Braun), supra, 600 F.2d at 428; Hearings on H.R. 94,
95th Cong., 1st Sess. 713 n. 1 (1977) (statement of Benjamin Civiletti,
Ass't Attorney General); id. at 742-43 (testimony of Benjamin [**6]
Civiletti, Ass't Attorney General); cf. Soobzokov v. CBS, Inc., 642 F.2d
28, 31 (2d Cir.1981) ("When it becomes obvious that sanctions are not
go-ing to compel compliance, they lose their remedial characteris-tics
and take on more of the nature of punishment.). Moreover, the court
retains the ability to determine the length of incarcera-tion in light
of, not only the apparent lack of effect of incarcera-tion, but also the
surrounding circumstances and the need for the witness's evidence. In re
Cueto, 443 F. Supp. 857, 864 (S.D.N.Y. 1978).
This is a case in which the Court is inclined to exercise its power to
release a recalcitrant witness. First, it has become in-creasingly clear
to this Court that Dohrn's recalcitrance will continue and that further
incarceration will not compel her to cooperate. Second, the importance
of Dohrn's handwriting ex-emplars has diminished over time. Despite
Dohrn's recalci-trance, the grand jury investigation has proceeded
apace, and, as noted above, a number of indictments have been returned.
(Dohrn, however, has not been indicted and has not even been named as a
coconspirator in the existing indictments.) More-over, according to a
newspaper article [**7] in late November 1982, one of the major
participants in the Inwood robbery has agreed to cooperate with the
Government in its investigation. Third, to the extent that the
Government needs samples of Dohrn's handwriting, it already has such
samples at its dis-posal. The Court has recently learned that the FBI
has had, for a number of years, enough of Dohrn's handwriting to make a
comparison with a questioned document and did so at an earlier time. In
addition, Dohrn has written letters to the Court and has filed petitions
with the Warden of the MCC concerning prison conditions.
Nevertheless, the Government does not concede that the hand-writing
samples at its disposal are adequate. Although it ac-knowledges that, by
comparing the current writings with the earlier documents in its
possession, it can conclude that Dohrn signed these documents, it does
not acknowledge that it can es-tablish that the body of each document
was written by Dohrn. This position is tenuous, however, because one
need not be a handwriting analyst to observe that the handwriting in the
let-ters is very similar to the signatures.
The Government also argues that neither the known exemplars nor the
current specimens [**8] are sufficiently comparable to the questioned
specimens to permit a judgment as to whether Dohrn wrote the questioned
specimens. What it wants is for her to write the identical words or
names that are on the questioned documents. This argument is also
questionable. While a prac-ticing lawyer, I had substantial experience
with questioned documents. It is reasonably easy to determine whether a
signa-ture is a forgery if adequate specimens are presented. On the
other hand, if all that is involved is a signature, it is extremely
difficult to determine who wrote the forged signature. Indeed, if the
person writing the signature attempted to imitate the hand-writing of
the person whose signature is being forged, it be-comes impossible.
Moreover, if a person who forged a signa-ture is requested to write a
few words, particularly a name, in a certain manner and if that person
recalls the manner in which he previously wrote the signature, he can
very easily change sig-nificantly the manner in which the exemplar is
delivered. 5 Spontaneous writings such as those presently in the
possession of the Court and the [*182] Government provide a much more
accurate basis for identifying the handwriting [**9] of the sub-ject.
Nevertheless, the Government continues to insist upon having Dohrn
execute specific exemplars, and Dohrn contin-ues to resist. This leaves
the Court between the immovable ob-ject and the irresistible force, an
unpleasant place to be.
5 Dohrn's counsel knows the name on the forged applica-tion and the
prosecution believes that an attempt was made by the forger to conceal
the writer's natural hand-writing. In this situation, the value of the
demanded ex-emplars is highly questionable even if Dohrn was the forger.
The Court does not believe that Judge Edelstein's recent opinion
concerning Eve Rosahn, In re Eve Rosahn, 551 F. Supp. 505
(S.D.N.Y.1982), compels a conclusion different from the one reached
here. Rosahn is another person held in contempt be-cause she failed to
comply with a court order directing her to provide the same grand jury
with photographs, fingerprints, handwriting exemplars, and hair samples.
After nine months in jail, she moved to vacate the contempt order,
arguing that she [**10] was being persecuted as a political activist and
that there was no purpose in confining her because her continued refusal
to cooperate after nine months in jail substantiated her prior
assertions that she would never cooperate with the grand jury. 6 (Like
Dohrn, see supra note 4, she too submitted nu-merous testimonials to her
adamancy.)
6 These arguments were previously made and rejected by Judge Edelstein
and the Court of Appeals.
Judge Edelstein granted the motion in part and denied it in part. He
vacated that part of the order requiring Rosahn to submit to
fingerprinting because the Government already had in its pos-session
major case fingerprints of Rosahn. Id., at 508-509. He noted that "as
the grounds for contempt narrow, this court be-comes concerned. To hold
a contemnor, who is currently not charged with any crime, in jail for
eighteen months for her re-fusal to supply items already in the
government's possession would be a travesty of justice." Id., at 509
(footnotes omitted). 7 Judge [**11] Edelstein, however, refused to
vacate that part of the order concerning the hair and handwriting
samples. He rea-soned that Rosahn
is closely connected with the criminal activity -- her car was used in
the [Brinks] robbery, and there is evidence that she rented a van that
was also used. She has indicated her support for the criminal activity
being investigated. Hair samples and written materials related to the
criminal activities being investigated are as yet unidentified, but
suspected to belong to Rosahn, so the subpoenaed items are directly
relevant and important. Finally, samples of Rosahn's hair and
handwriting samples can be obtained from no source other than Rosahn
herself. Thus this court finds no basis for exercising its discretion to
order Rosahn's release.
Id., at 508 (footnote omitted).
7 According to Judge Edelstein,
This [was] the second error of this sort that the gov-ernment has made
in this case. At the grand jury the government maintained that it had no
photograph of Rosahn, but conceded in argument before the court of
appeals that it did. The court accordingly vacated that part of the
contempt order requiring Rosahn to submit to photographing.
Id., at 509. Consequently, he also ordered the Government to search
their files for the other subpoenaed items. Id., at 509.
[**12] This Court agrees completely with the result reached by Judge
Edelstein. Any difference in the conclusion reached by this Court
results solely from factual differences between the cases. For example,
in Rosahn's case, her direct connection with the criminal activity was
more clearly established, the im-portance of the evidence to the grand
jury appeared greater, and the Government did not have the hair and
handwriting samples in its possession. Moreover, the Court believes that
the reasons for reaching the result in this case are virtually identical
to the reasons Judge Edelstein vacated that part of his order requiring
Rosahn to submit to fingerprinting. As noted above, the Gov-ernment now
possesses a number of spontaneous exemplars of Dohrn's handwriting. The
need for the additional exemplars has not been demonstrated, and the
value of the additional ex-emplars is extremely questionable. In light
of the contemnor's attitude, this Court runs the risk of imprisoning her
for eighteen months for no discernible purpose, other than to justify
her de-sire to be a martyr [*183] and the Government's insistence that
she comply.
In sum, factors such as the likely failure of further [**13] in-carceration
to compel Dohrn's cooperation, the diminished im-portance of Dohrn's
handwriting exemplars, and the availabil-ity of spontaneous exemplars of
Dohrn's handwriting, when taken together, lead this Court to the
conclusion that its order of contempt should be modified. Thus, the
order of contempt is modified to direct Dohrn's release from jail at
this time. 8
8 Dohrn was furloughed shortly before Christmas because the Court
thought that this opinion would take some time to prepare and because it
seemed likely that it would reach the decision rendered today.
SO ORDERED.
44 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
January 5, 1983, Wednesday, PM cycle
Judge Frees Radical Who Was Jailed for Grand Jury Refusal
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 194 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A federal judge has freed political radical Bernardine Dohrn, who was
jailed seven months ago for refusing to coop-erate with a grand jury
investigating a 1981 Brink's armored car robbery.
U.S. District Judge Gerard L. Goettel said late Tuesday that Miss Dohrn
need not return to the federal jail in Manhattan from a Christmas
holiday furlough she was granted Dec. 23.
Miss Dohrn, a former member of the Weather Under-ground, was one of
several material witnesses subpoenaed by the federal grand jury
investigating the robbery in which two Nyack policemen and a guard were
killed.
After refusing to cooperate with a demand for samples of her
handwriting, Miss Dohrn was taken before Goettel, cited for contempt and
jailed on May 19.
Miss Dohrn could have been kept jailed until the grand jury's term of
office expired, a maximum of 18 months.
However, Goettel decided to grant Miss Dohrn's motion for earlier
release on grounds that federal prosecutors had other ways to obtain
samples of her handwriting and it was unlikely she would agree to
cooperate.
Federal prosecutors had argued that the only available handwriting
samples were 10 years old.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1983 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
45 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
January 5, 1983, Wednesday, AM cycle
People in the News
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 176 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Political radical Bernardine Dohrn is free after seven months in jail
for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury inves-tigating a 1981
Brink's armored car robbery.
U.S. District Judge Gerard L. Goettel said Tuesday that Miss Dohrn does
not have to return to the federal jail in Manhattan from a Christmas
holiday furlough she was granted Dec. 23.
Miss Dohrn, a former member of the Weather Under-ground, was one of
several witnesses subpoenaed by the federal grand jury investigating the
robbery in which two Nyack po-licemen and a guard were killed.
After refusing to give samples of her handwriting, Miss Dohrn was taken
before Goettel, cited for contempt and jailed on May 19.
Miss Dohrn could have been held in jail for 18 months until the grand
jury term expired.
Goettel said he decided to grant Miss Dohrn's motion for early release
because federal prosecutors had other ways to get samples of her
handwriting and it was unlikely she would co-operate.
Federal prosecutors say her only available handwriting sam-ples were 10
years old.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Laserphoto NY40
Copyright 1983 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
46 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
January 6, 1983, Thursday, Late City Final Edition
THE CITY;
Bernardine Dohrn Freed by Judge
BYLINE: By The Associated Press
SECTION: Section B; Page 3, Column 5; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 171 words
A Federal judge has freed Bernardine Dohrn, who was jailed seven months
ago for refusing to cooperate with a Federal grand jury investigating
the 1981 Brink's armored-car robbery in Rockland County.
The judge, Gerard L. Goettel of District Court, said late Tuesday that
Miss Dohrn did not have to return to the Federal jail in Manhattan from
a Christmas furlough she was given Dec. 23. Miss Dohrn, a former member
of the Weather Under-ground, was one of several uncooperative witnesses
subpoe-naed by the Federal grand jury probing the aborted robbery in
which two Nyack police officers and a guard were killed.
After refusing to cooperate with a demand for samples of her
handwriting, Miss Dohrn was cited for contempt and jailed on May 19. She
could have been jailed until the grand jury's term expired, a maximum of
18 months.
However, Judge Goettel decided to grant a release on the ground that
prosecutors had other ways to obtain samples of her handwriting and that
it was unlikely she would agree to cooper-ate.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1983 The New York Times Company
47 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
February 5, 1983, Saturday, AM cycle
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associate Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 1419 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Bernardine Dohrn, a former Weather Underground leader who just spent
seven months in federal prison for defying a grand jury, cites her own
freedom as a flaw in the system she has fought so long.
She says her white skin got her out. Eight others who balked, mostly
black women, remain behind bars.
"You can't look at the situation and not say that racism isn't a
significant reason why they're still in," the 41-year-old former
fugitive told The Associated Press in her first interview since her
release late last year.
To Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Litt, there is a different reason why
Ms. Dohrn is free _ the imposing credentials of the attorneys hired by
her influential father-in-law.
She calls them "fancy, ruling class lawyers" and takes issue with their
characterization of her as a "Joan of Arc."
To Robert Boyle, an attorney working to free the other grand jury
resisters, Ms. Dohrn "was everyone's favorite fugitive for all those
years" _ someone who has consistently received pref-erential treatment
from a system she denounces.
The woman who spent 11 years on the run _ including four on the FBI's
"Most Wanted" list as an alleged conspirator in ri-ots and bombings in
the late '60s and early '70s _ agreed re-cently to speak to the AP.
Now married and working as a legal assistant, she talked over lunch at
the Algonquin Hotel, a literati haven she recalled visiting with her
mother years ago in hopes of seeing someone famous.
She kept questions about her Weatherman days and personal life off
limits. Her hazel eyes narrowed sharply when those ground rules were
breached with a question about whether the underground years were worth
it.
"I really don't want to give a glib answer. ... I'm not sorry for the
broad choices I made," she said finally.
Spared a prison term for her part in the "Days of Rage" demonstrations
in Chicago in 1969, Ms. Dohrn was jailed here last May on civil contempt
charges for refusing to give hand-writing samples to a federal grand
jury.
The panel is investigating a possible terrorist conspiracy in several
robberies, including the 1981 holdup of a Brink's truck in Nanuet, N.Y.,
in which two police officers and a Brink's guard were killed.
She refused to cooperate, she said, because "there was no other choice"
_ she had to live up to her radical principles so she could look her two
young sons in the eye.
"You can't betray everything you've ever lived in all your life," she
said fiercely, tossing her dark, shoulder-length hair back from her
face.
While in jail she changed her mind about one principle, her
long-standing opposition to marriage, although she wouldn't say why.
Last October, she took a weekend furlough to wed Wil-liam Ayers, her
longtime companion and the boys' father.
That is one pragmatic concession in her life since the '60s when she was
a proponent of the radical "smash monogamy" movement that discouraged
sexual fidelity to one person on grounds it hampered loyalty to the
group.
The matter of her freedom is another.
Helping her case, apparently not at her behest, were two lawyers hired
by her father-in-law, Thomas G. Ayers, former chairman of Chicago's
Commonwealth Edison.
The lawyers, Harold R. Tyler Jr. and Don H. Reuben, won her release by
citing a case in which a resister was freed after a judge decided
further jail time would not force his cooperation. They argued that Ms.
Dohrn saw herself as a Joan of Arc figure who wouldn't cooperate "if
they burned her at the stake." U.S. District Judge Gerard Goettel
agreed.
Calling Reuben and Tyler "two of the best known and most outstanding
attorneys in the United States," Goettel on Jan. 4 said Ms. Dohrn need
not return to prison from her December furlough.
But the other grand jury resisters' bids for freedom have been rejected.
They, too, had affidavits from attorneys, but, noted prosecutor Litt,
"they didn't come from Harold Tyler."
"Bernardine Dohrn is a somewhat more privileged person than the rest of
them by her background and family and so on," Litt said. "She benefitted
by that in terms of impressing the judge."
Tyler, a former federal judge in the district Goettel serves and a
former deputy U.S. attorney general, said Ms. Dohrn got no special
treatment because of him.
"It so happens that Ms. Dohrn is married to a young man who is the son
of a family in Chicago of some reputation," he said. "They have
children. The grandparents were concerned, which I can't blame them
for."
He said he and Reuben tried to get her to cooperate but "got nowhere."
"I did talk to the U.S. attorney himself and his staff ... but if that's
special treatment, holy gosh!" said Tyler.
Ms. Dohrn acknowledged her luck in avoiding jail in the past. That's one
reason, she said, the government was using the Brink's probe to get
black and white radicals of the past.
"In my particular case, I feel there is no way to avoid the fact that
there are some elements of historical retribution in-volved," she said.
As a fugitive, Ms. Dohrn was the Weather spokeswoman whose 1970
"Declaration of War" on the government was fol-lowed by bombings for
which the organization took responsi-bility.
A decade later, the FBI quietly ended its pursuit of the Mil-waukee
native. Riot and conspiracy charges were dropped. In 1980, Ms. Dorhn
surfaced after having spent her last fugitive years unnoticed as a
waitress in a Manhattan restaurant.
She pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the Chicago demonstrations
and was fined and put on three years' probation.
"I ... ended up _ a lot because of privilege and time going by and luck
_ not going to jail," she said, choosing her words care-fully. "We
always said when we made the decision to turn our-selves in that the
easiest way for them to get me was the grand jury."
The present grand jury is investigating the $1.6 million Brink's heist
in which Weather Underground and Black Lib-eration Army figures are
charged. Among them is Kathy Boudin, whose 2 1/2 -year-old son Chesa is
being cared for by Ms. Dohrn and Ayers.
Ms. Dohrn and the other resisters have refused to give handwriting
samples or otherwise cooperate with the grand jury in its efforts to
determine whether they are linked to that and other crimes.
The FBI says one of the resisters sheltered two fleeing rob-bers after
the holdup. Another's car was used in the heist. But, like Ms. Dohrn,
they have not been charged with a crime. Some have been in jail for as
long as 13 months.
The FBI has suggested that while working as a clerk in a Broadway
clothing store, Ms. Dohrn copied information from a customer's driver's
license to get a duplicate license for rental of a station wagon for
another holdup.
She denies that charge as well as the government's claim that she met
with two fugitive Brink's suspects.
"They made outrageous claims about my participation. None of it was
true," she said. "But they didn't have to prove it, of course.
Theoretically it's up to us to disprove it. It's the whole system in
reverse."
In his decision freeing her, Goettel noted that the govern-ment now
suggests Ms. Dohrn may have been merely "an un-witting facilitator of
the criminal activity."
Prosecutor Litt won't go that far. "We have said at the very least she
was an unwilling abettor and she may have been in-volved," he said. "But
without the handwriting exemplars (sam-ples), we couldn't tell."
"They have bushels of my handwriting," Ms. Dohrn re-sponded with a wry
smile. She cited tax forms, letters she wrote the judge complaining
about conditions in prison and samples seized during her activist days.
Authorities say they don't have enough recent samples. As for Miss
Dohrn's assertions the government was out to get radicals and
dissidents, U.S. Attorney John S. Martin Jr. said, "They've made those
arguments in court and they have been consistently rejected."
After coffee in the Algonquin's Rose Room, Ms. Dohrn prepared to return
to her job in a Manhattan law office. A 1967 graduate of the University
of Chicago Law School, she said she was thinking of taking the bar exam.
There was in her trousers, tweed blazer and plaid scarf a cer-tain
lawyer-like chic. When she spoke vigorously, as she did about the grand
jury, her long, fan-shaped earrings bobbed up and down.
Later, sitting at her desk covered with law books, she was asked about
Reuben and Tyler's statement that she "may well perceive herself as a
second Joan of Arc." There was a short, slightly embarrassed laugh.
"I don't feel like a martyr," she said quietly.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Laserphoto NY58 of Feb 4
Copyright 1983 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
48 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
February 6, 1983, Sunday, BC cycle
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 671 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
[TEXT OMITTED FROM SOURCE]
"got nowhere."
"I did talk to the U.S. attorney himself and his staff ... but if that's
special treatment, holy gosh!" said Tyler.
Ms. Dohrn acknowledged her luck in avoiding jail in the past. That's one
reason, she said, the government was using the Brink's probe to get
black and white radicals of the past.
"In my particular case, I feel there is no way to avoid the fact that
there are some elements of historical retribution in-volved," she said.
As a fugitive, Ms. Dohrn was the Weather spokeswoman whose 1970
"Declaration of War" on the government was fol-lowed by bombings for
which the organization took responsi-bility.
A decade later, the FBI quietly ended its pursuit of the Mil-waukee
native. Riot and conspiracy charges were dropped. In 1980, Ms. Dorhn
surfaced after having spent her last fugitive years unnoticed as a
waitress in a Manhattan restaurant.
She pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the Chicago demonstrations
and was fined and put on three years' probation.
"I ... ended up _ a lot because of privilege and time going by and luck
_ not going to jail," she said, choosing her words care-fully. "We
always said when we made the decision to turn our-selves in that the
easiest way for them to get me was the grand jury."
The present grand jury is investigating the $1.6 million Brink's heist
in which Weather Underground and Black Lib-eration Army figures are
charged. Among them is Kathy Boudin, whose 2 1/2 -year-old son Chesa is
being cared for by Ms. Dohrn and Ayers.
Ms. Dohrn and the other resisters have refused to give handwriting
samples or otherwise cooperate with the grand jury in its efforts to
determine whether they are linked to that and other crimes.
The FBI says one of the resisters sheltered two fleeing rob-bers after
the holdup. Another's car was used in the heist. But, like Ms. Dohrn,
they have not been charged with a crime. Some have been in jail for as
long as 13 months.
The FBI has suggested that while working as a clerk in a Broadway
clothing store, Ms. Dohrn copied information from a customer's driver's
license to get a duplicate license for rental of a station wagon for
another holdup.
She denies that charge as well as the government's claim that she met
with two fugitive Brink's suspects.
"They made outrageous claims about my participation. None of it was
true," she said. "But they didn't have to prove it, of course.
Theoretically it's up to us to disprove it. It's the whole system in
reverse."
In his decision freeing her, Goettel noted that the govern-ment now
suggests Ms. Dohrn may have been merely "an un-witting facilitator of
the criminal activity."
Prosecutor Litt won't go that far. "We have said at the very least she
was an unwilling abettor and she may have been in-volved," he said. "But
without the handwriting exemplars (sam-ples), we couldn't tell."
"They have bushels of my handwriting," Ms. Dohrn re-sponded with a wry
smile. She cited tax forms, letters she wrote the judge complaining
about conditions in prison and samples seized during her activist days.
Authorities say they don't have enough recent samples. As for Miss
Dohrn's assertions the government was out to get radicals and
dissidents, U.S. Attorney John S. Martin Jr. said, "They've made those
arguments in court and they have been consistently rejected."
After coffee in the Algonquin's Rose Room, Ms. Dohrn prepared to return
to her job in a Manhattan law office. A 1967 graduate of the University
of Chicago Law School, she said she was thinking of taking the bar exam.
There was in her trousers, tweed blazer and plaid scarf a cer-tain
lawyer-like chic. When she spoke vigorously, as she did about the grand
jury, her long, fan-shaped earrings bobbed up and down.
Later, sitting at her desk covered with law books, she was asked about
Reuben and Tyler's statement that she "may well perceive herself as a
second Joan of Arc." There was a short, slightly embarrassed laugh.
"I don't feel like a martyr," she said quietly.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1983 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
49 of 74 DOCUMENTS
In the Matter of SHAHEEM MALIK JABBAR, a/k/a "John Crenshaw", Civil
Contemnor
No. M-11-188
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
560 F. Supp. 186; 1983 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 18702
March 9, 1983
CASE SUMMARY:
PROCEDURAL POSTURE: Movant witness filed a request to be relieved from a
finding of civil contempt after he failed to testify before a grand
jury.
OVERVIEW: The witness was called to testify before a grand jury. The
underlying crime involved the armed robbery of an armored truck. The
witness refused to testify. As a result, the witness was held in civil
contempt. The witness filed a motion for an order relieving him from the
finding of civil contempt and directing his release from custody. The
court denied the motion. The court rejected the witness's argument that
keeping him in custody was punitive because he would never cooperate
with the grand jury investigation. The court also concluded that the
witness had no standing to assert that the grand jury proce-dures were
being used illegally to conduct discovery or prepare a pending
indictment for trial.
OUTCOME: The court denied the motion.
CORE TERMS: grand jury, grand jury, civil contempt, exem-plars,
contemnor, accessories, punitive, urges, imprisonment, handwriting,
cooperate, vacated, movant
LexisNexis(R) Headnotes
Civil Procedure > Justiciability > Standing > General Over-view
Criminal Law & Procedure > Grand Juries > Procedures > Return of
Indictments > General Overview
Criminal Law & Procedure > Accusatory Instruments > In-dictments >
General Overview
[HN1] A grand jury witness has no standing to assert that grand jury
procedures are being used illegally to conduct discovery or prepare a
pending indictment for trial.
COUNSEL: [**1] Jane Parver, Ass't. U.S. Attorney, for Gov-ernment.
Susan Tipograph.
JUDGES: Brieant, J.
OPINION BY: BRIEANT
OPINION
[*187] MEMORANDUM AND ORDER
Brieant, J.
Mr. Shaheem Jabbar, a grand jury witness now being held in civil
contempt for refusal to testify, moves for an order reliev-ing him from
the finding of civil contempt, and directing his re-lease forthwith from
the custody of the United States Marshal for the Southern District of
New York.
For the reasons set forth and analyzed fully in our Memoran-dum and
Order In re Rene Thornton, a/k/a "Asha", Civil Con-temnor, 560 F. Supp.
183, dated March 9, 1983, familiarity with which is assumed, the
contemnor's motion is denied in all respects, and the Order of this
Court dated June 2, 1982 is con-tinued in full force and effect.
Mr. Jabbar, together with Ms. Thornton and others said to num-ber a
total of nine recalcitrant witnesses, have adopted what movant describes
as "a movement of non-collaboration" with grand jury investigations. In
support of his motion for early discharge, Mr. Jabbar urges (Affirmation
of Susan V. Tipog-raph, Esq., docketed February 28, 1983, para. 21) that
"since the sole intent of incarceration pursuant to an adjudication
[**2] of civil contempt is to 'coerce' a witness to cooperate, if the
per-son will not be coerced the imprisonment is punitive and must be
vacated." Mr. Jabbar now represents that he "will never co-operate with
this grand jury investigation."
This contention is rejected here for essentially the same reasons that
this Court rejected the same contention in Matter of Rene Thornton,
supra, decided March 9, 1983. There is no factual or legal distinction
between that case and this. Accordingly, repe-tition of the analysis
therein contained would add nothing.
In addition to the "punitive" argument, this contemnor also urges other
points. He says, first, that the grand jury procedures are being used
illegally "to conduct discovery or prepare a pending indictment for
trial." [HN1] A grand jury witness has no standing to assert this
contention. Matter of Fula, 672 F.2d 279, 283 (2d Cir. 1982); In re
Grand Jury Proceedings Involv-ing Eva Rosahn, 671 F.2d 690, 695 (2d Cir.
1982). Further-more, this Court sees no reason to reject the
representation of the Government that the underlying crime, which is the
October 20, 1981 armed robbery of a Brinks armored truck in Rockland
County, New York, has [**3] not yet been fully investigated, and that
all participants and accessories are not known or in-dicted. So long as
it is reasonably possible that accessories, co-conspirators, aiders and
abetters or other participants remain unindicted, the exercise by the
grand jury of its traditional pow-ers may not be inhibited by this Court
at the instance of a wit-ness.
Secondly, counsel for movant, at oral argument, challenged an apparent
disparity between the case of Mr. Jabbar and that of Bernardine Dohrn,
another grand jury witness in the same in-vestigation, whose commitment
for civil contempt was vacated after seven months of recalcitrance while
confined. See In the Matter of the Subpoena Served Upon Bernardine
Dohrn, 560 F. supp. 179 (S.D.N.Y. January 4, 1983). She argued that the
only difference between her client's case and that of Dohrn is that
Dohrn was able to obtain supportive affidavits from "two of the nation's
leading attorneys" (at p. 180), identified by name in a footnote, while
Mr. Jabbar is unable to obtain such establish-ment support in
justification for his own intransigeance. This Court rejects that
analysis. Assuming for the argument that Dohrn was correctly decided,
[**4] the decision is readily dis-tinguishable on other factual grounds.
Dohrn was subject only to a direction to give handwriting ex-emplars to
the grand jury. During her confinement it appeared that the grand jury
in fact had adequate handwriting exemplars, augmented by letters written
to the Court and petitions filed with the Warden, at 181. The court
[*188] found in its discre-tion that "the value of the additional
exemplars [sought] is ex-tremely questionable" and that further
imprisonment would be "for no discernible purpose, other than to justify
her desire to be a martyr 1 and the Government's insistence that she
comply."
1 The eminent attorneys contended that Dohrn "is intrac-table in her
views and beliefs to the point of fanaticism [and] may well perceive
herself as a second Joan of Arc." (At 180). While Saint Jeanne was
canonized for what she did, probably most modern philosophers regard her
as de-ranged.
The motion is denied.
So Ordered.
50 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
September 1, 1983 Thursday
Pair want to wed behind bars
BYLINE: REUT
LENGTH: 224 words
DATELINE: GOSHEN, N.Y.,
GOSHEN, N.Y., (Reuter) - Although both are well-educated and she is from
a prominent family, it is not going to be the usual wedding where the
groom asks the bride's father for his daughter's hand and her family
finds
a caterer.
In this case, Orange County sheriff Roger Phillips has to ap-prove, and
the wedding will probably be in the jail here.
Self-proclaimed revolutionaries Kathy Boudin, 40, and David Gilbert,
38, the father of her three-year-old son, have asked permission to wed
and
have taken the obligatory blood test without waiting for ap-proval.
Sheriff Phillips said he will decide within the next two weeks whether
the couple - who are charged with murder, robbery and assault in the
aborted 1981 robbery of a Brinks' armored truck in Nanuet, N.Y. -may
marry.
'I'm not sure I'm going to act favorably on it,' he said.
Both Mr. Gilbert and Miss Boudin, a former leader of the Weather
Underground group, have been in prison since October 1981 when they were
arrested following the Brinks robbery.
Gilbert is now on trial for allegedly taking part in the rob-bery that
left two policemen and a Brinks guard dead.
Last fall Bernadine Dohrn obtained a brief furlough from prison to
marry William Ayres, father of her two children. At the time she was in
prison for refusing to co-operate with a grand jury investigat-ing the
Brinks robbery.
LOAD-DATE: January 24, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper
Copyright 1983 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licen-sors
All Rights Reserved
51 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
September 25, 1983, Sunday, Late City Final Edi-tion
STATUS OF MAJOR FIGURES IN THE BRINK'S CASES
SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 50, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 896 words
Kuwesl Balagoon - Also known as Donald Weems. Con-victed Sept. 14 in the
state case on three counts of first-degree armed robbery. Identified in
testimony as one of at least five gunmen wh jumped from a rented truck
and shot at police near the roadblock.. After the shooting, he
commandeered a car and escaped. His palm print was found on the tag of a
stolen Brink's money bag containing $361,000. He had earlier ex-caped
from New Jersey prison and still must serve a sentence for armed robbery
and attempted murder there.
Sylvia Pia Baraldlni-Found guilty of conspriacy and racket-eering
charges on Sept. 3 in the Federal case, which includes the Nanuet holdup
and several other armored-car robberies as well as the 1979 prison
escape of Joanne Chesimard. Faces up to 40 years at sentencing next
month.
Cynthia Boston-Also known as Fulani Sunni-Ali. Married to Bilal
Sunni-Ali, also known as William Johnson. Jailed for civil contempt
after refusing to cooperate with a Federal grand jury. Has not been
charged.
Kathy Boudln-Her case on the state charges was severed from the others,
with trial set for Oct. 12 in Goshen. She was stopped by an off-duty New
York City corrections officer while running from the roadblock at the
time of the shootout, in which the policemen were killed. Hours after
David Gilbert was convicted in the state case, he and Miss Boudin were
married. They have a son, Chesa, 3 years old.
Samuel Brown - His case on the state charges was also sev-ered and he is
scheduled to go on trial with Miss Boudin Oct. 12. A detective
testifying at the state trial identified him as the person who fatally
shot one of the policeman at the roadblock. A bank teller at the Nanuet
National Bank, where the Brink's truck was robbed, testified that he was
at the scene moments before the robbery.
Marilyn Jean Buck-Still being sought on Federal charges of bank robbery.
She also faces state Brink's charges of murder and robbery. Escaped in a
white Oldsmobile while three others, riding behind her in a tan Honda,
were captured at the road-block in Nyack. Her car was found a few days
later in Pelham, N.Y., splattered with blood. Authorities believe she
accidentally shot herself in a leg.
Judith A. Clark-Convicted in the state case of murder and robbery
charges. Captured after a getaway car crashed during a police chase in
Nyack.
Cheri Laverne Dalton-Still being sought by state and Federal authorities
for questioning in the Rockland case.
Bernardine Dhrn-A former member of the Weather Under-ground. Refused to
cooperate with a Federal grand jury. Jailed briefly for contempt Married
to William C. Ayers, another Weather Underground member.
Cecillo Rodrigo Ferguson-Convicted in the Federal trial as accessory
after the fact for helping the suspects escape the scene. Faces up to 12
1/2 years in prison.
David Joesph Gilbert-Convicted in the state case on three counts of
second-degree murder and-four counts of first-degree robbery. Witnesses
testified that he rented the truck that was in-volved in the getaway.
When captured, he was wearing clothing containing glass from the
windshield of the Brink's truck. F.B.I. agents testified that he was
within 12 feet of that wind-shield when it was shot out by a shotgun.
Married Miss Boudin shortly after his conviction.
Edward L. Joseph-Convicted in the Federal trial of being an accessory
after the fact for helping the others escape the scene. Faces 12 1/2
years in prison.
Anthony N. LaBorde-State charges were dismissed after a witness failed
to pick him out of a line-up. On train in Queens in an unrelated case
involving the slaying of a policeman.
Sekou Odlnga-Also known as Nathanial Burns. Convicted in Federal case on
one count of conspiracy and one of racketeer-ing. Each charge carries a
maximum sentence of 20 years. Charges pending in Rockland County. The
only witness called by the defense at the state trial. Also faces
charges of attempted murder in Queens stemming from a 1981 shootout with
the po-lice when he was captured near Shea Stadium three days after the
Brink's robbery in Rockland.
Eve Rosahn-The owner of the tan Honda used as a getaway car. Held
briefly on contempt charges. State charges of criminal facilitation were
dropped.
Tyrone Rison-Pleaded guilty to an unrelated bank robbery charge in
Georgia and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. Transferred to Federal
custody, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and racketeeting charges in the
Federal case. After agreeing to testify for the prosecution, he was
allowed to serve the Georgia sentence in a Federal facility. Faces
sentencing in the Federal case.
Illana Robinson-Acquitted of all charges in the Federal case. Charged as
an accessory after the fact for helping Mr. Ferguson escape and for
treating Marilyn Buck's leg wound.
Susan Rosenberg-Still being sought on Federal charges of bank robber and
conspiracy.
Mutulu Shakur-Also known as Jeral Wayne Williams. Still being sought on
Federal charges of racketeering, conspiracy and armed robbery. Suspected
of aiding Miss Chesimard in her prison escape. On the F.B.I.'s list of
10 most-wanted criminals.
Samuel Smith-Killed in the shootout with the police near Shea Stadium in
1981.
Bllal Sunni-Ali-Also known as William Johnson. Acquitted of all charges
in the Federal trial. Married to Cynthia Boston.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: photos of Kathy Boudin, Judith A. Clark, Berna-dine Dohrn;
photos of David Joseph Gilbert, Sekou Odinga
TYPE: list
Copyright 1983 The New York Times Company
52 of 74 DOCUMENTS
In the Matter of FULANI SUNNI-ALI Civil Con-temnor
No. M 11 188 (RLC)
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
1983 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12599
October 19, 1983
CASE SUMMARY:
PROCEDURAL POSTURE: Petitioner civil contemnor sought release from
custody after six months of incarceration for civil contempt.
OVERVIEW: After the contemnor's husband was arrested in a robbery case,
the contemnor was served with a grand jury sub-poena to supply
handwriting exemplars and hair samples. When she failed to comply, she
was held in civil contempt and incar-cerated. The contemnor claimed that
her release was required because her confinement had lost its coercive
effect and had be-come punitive. The court ordered the contemnor
discharged be-cause, under the circumstances, further incarceration
would have been punitive. Courts had broad discretion to determine that
a civil contempt sanction had lost its coercive effect before the
18-month maximum period prescribed by Congress. The is-sue was whether
the contemnor would bend if she were con-fined longer. The court
determined that she would not. The con-temnor had announced that she
would never cooperate with the government, and other witnesses had
testified to her resolve never to obey the grand jury subpoena. In view
of the offense, six months' incarceration was long enough to determine
whether coercion would work.
OUTCOME: The court ordered the contemnor discharged from custody.
CORE TERMS: grand jury, civil contempt, contemnor, hand-writing,
exemplars, incarceration, furlough, subpoena, confine-ment, coercive
effect, contempt, convinced, confined, hair, obey, coercive, cooperate,
custody, recalcitrant witness', realis-tic possibility, conscientious,
maximum, contempt citation, in-dividualized, incarcerated, discharged,
so-called, arrested, de-tained, punitive
LexisNexis(R) Headnotes
Civil Procedure > Sanctions > Contempt > Civil Contempt
Criminal Law & Procedure > Criminal Offenses > Miscella-neous Offenses >
Contempt > Penalties
[HN1] Where confinement has lost its coercive effect and has become
punitive, incarceration for civil contempt is no longer appropriate.
Under such circumstances, the government should be required to proceed
against the recalcitrant party by way of criminal contempt.
Civil Procedure > Judicial Officers > Judges > Discretion
Civil Procedure > Sanctions > Contempt > Civil Contempt
Constitutional Law > Bill of Rights > Fundamental Rights > Procedural
Due Process > Scope of Protection
[HN2] With respect to recalcitrant witnesses before federal grand
juries, Congress has determined that 18 months is the maximum period of
confinement for civil contempt. 28 U.S.C.S. § 1826. In the absence of
unusual circumstances, a re-viewing court should be reluctant to
conclude, as a matter of due process, that a civil contempt sanction has
lost its coercive impact at some point prior to the 18-month period
prescribed as a maximum by Congress. There remains, nevertheless, a
broad discretion in the district courts to determine that a civil
con-tempt sanction has lost its coercive effect upon a particular con-temnor
at some point short of 18 months.
Civil Procedure > Judicial Officers > General Overview
Civil Procedure > Sanctions > Contempt > Civil Contempt
Constitutional Law > Bill of Rights > Fundamental Rights > Procedural
Due Process > Scope of Protection
[HN3] Even if a judge concludes that it is a contemnor's present
intention never to testify, that conclusion does not preclude the
possibility that continued confinement will cause the witness to change
his mind. What is required of the judge is a conscien-tious effort to
determine whether there remains a realistic pos-sibility that continued
confinement might cause the contemnor to testify. The burden is properly
placed on the contemnor to demonstrate that no such realistic
possibility exists. As long as the judge is satisfied that the coercive
sanction might yet pro-duce its intended result, the confinement may
continue. But if the judge is persuaded, after a conscientious
consideration of the circumstances pertinent to the individual
contemnor, that the contempt power has ceased to have a coercive effect,
the civil contempt remedy should be ended.
COUNSEL: [*1] FULANI SUNNI-ALI, 150 Park Row, New York, New York 10007,
Pro Se.
LYNNE F. STEWART, ESQ., Legal Adviser, 162 Charles Street, New York, New
York.
RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI, United States Attorney for the Southern District of
New York, One St. Andrew's Plaza, New York, New York 10007
ROBERT S. LITT, Assistant United States Attorney, Of Coun-sel.
OPINION BY: CARTER
OPINION
OPINION
CARTER, District Judge
Two prior oral determinations have been made in this case. Now, however,
a written decision seems best suited to accom-plish the task confronting
the court. Therefore, recapitulation of the history of the case is
mandated. In 1981, Fulani Sunni-Ali was served with a grand jury
subpoena to provide handwrit-ing exemplars and hair samples. The
government alleges that that she litigated extensively the validity of
the subpoena, and that after all her challenges were rejected, she fled
the country rather than comply. Affidavit of Robert Litt, Asst. U.S.
Attor-ney. Her exposition of what happened is more lurid. She as-serts
that in October, 1981, she was arrested in Gallman, Mis-sissippi by a
hundred federal agents and local police, accompa-nied "by tanks,
lelicopters and fighter planes." She [*2] alleges that her children were
"handcuffed, tied together and detained." She states that she was
brought to New York as a suspect, ap-parently in the so-called Brinks
robbery, but was released a month later when her alibi, which confirmed
that she was not a participant in the robbery, nor on the scene, was
verified. Thereafter, the subpoena was issued. Affidavit of Sunni-Ali.
From this point on, the government's and-petitioner's version more or
less coincide.
After the arrest of her husband in November, 1982, petitioner
voluntarily surrendered. At the outset she was detained as a material
witness. She remained in that status during November. In December, the
government obtained an order from the court requiring petitioner to
comply with the grand jury subpoena to supply handwriting exemplars and
hair samples. When she re-fused to obey the court's order, she was held
in civil contempt and incarcerated.
On or about December 16, 1982, with the consent of the gov-ernment, she
was granted a furlough to give birth to her sixth child. The child was
born on January 10, 1983. While still on furlough, petitioner moved to
have her contempt citation va-cated and to have her furlough [*3]
continued to give her suffi-cient time to wean the child. The contempt
citation was not va-cated but, in the interest of the health of the
child, petitioner's furlough was extended until April 18, 1983. The
court made clear that it would grant no further extensions since it was
ap-parent that the evolving strategy of petitioner and her counsel was
to use the court's concern for the infant's well being as a basis for
seeking additional extensions of petitioner's furlough.
On April 14, 1983, an application for further extension was made. When
the court refused to entertain the application, the petitioner applied
to Judge Knapp, then in Part I. Judge Knapp extended the furlough for
three additional weeks, but subse-quent efforts to secure more time
failed. She was finally re-manded to jail on May 16, 1983, where she has
since been con-fined.
On June 3, 1983, she, along with others, filed a motion seeking release
on the ground that extension of the grand jury term was illegal. That
motion was referred to Judge Haight and was de-nied on August 10, 1983.
The instant motion was filed on September 6, 1983, before Judge Sweet
sitting in Part I, on behalf of petitioner and oth-ers.Relying [*4] on
local rules, Judge Sweet referred the vari-ous movants to the judge who
had issued the original contempt order in their case. Although
instructed shortly after Judge Sweet's determination to file an
appropriate motion before the court, petitioner did not file the instant
motion until October 7. The government's response was filed on October
12, and a hear-ing was held on October 14.
Petitioner contends that her release is required by Simkin v. United
States, No. 83-6185, slip op. at 5591 (2d Cir.), decided August 8, 1983,
and at the October 14 hearing petitioner pre-sented testimony designed
to demonstrate that under the Simkin yardstick, she should be released.
In that case, the Second Circuit ordered the district court to make
individualized determinations of the coercive effect of a recalcitrant
witness' continued confinement under civil con-tempt, pointing out that
[HN1] where confinement had lost its coercive effect and had become
punitive, incarceration for civil contempt was no longer appropriate.
Under such circumstances the government should be required to proceed
against the recal-citrant party by way of criminal contempt. In Simkin
the court stated:
[HN2] With respect to recalcitrant [*5] witnesses before fed-eral grand
juries, Congress has determined that eighteen months is the maximum
period of confinement for civil contempt. 28 U.S.C. § 1826. We agree
with the views of the Third Circuit, expressed by Judge Adams, that in
the absence of unusual cir-cumstances, a reviewing court should be
reluctant to conclude, as a matter of due process, that a civil contempt
sanction has lost its coercive impact at some point prior to the
eighteen-month period prescribed as a maximum by Congress. In re Grand
Jury Investigation (Braun), 600 F.2d 420, 427 (3d Cir. 1979).
There remains, nevertheless, a broad discretion in the district courts
to determine that a civil contempt sanction has lost its coercive effect
upon a particular contemnor at some point short of eighteen months. In
re Gand Jury Investigation (Braun), su-pra, 600 F.2d at 428; In re
Dohrn, 560 F. Supp. 179, 181 (S.D.N.Y. 1983); In re Cueto, 443 F. Supp.
857, 864 (S.D.N.Y. 1978). [Footnote omitted]. The exercise of that
discretion con-fronts a district judge with a perplexing task. The judge
need not, of course, accept as conclusive a contemnor's avowed in-tention
never to testify. United States v. Dien, supra, [*6] 598 F.2d at 745.
[HN3] Even if the judge concludes that it is the contemnor's present
intention never to testify, that conclusion does not preclude the
possibility that continued cnfinement will cause the witness to change
his mind. Id. What is required of the judge is a conscientious effort to
determine whether there remains a realistic possibility that continued
confinement might cause the contemnor to testify. The burden is properly
placed on the contemnor to demonstrate that no such realistic
possibil-ity exists. As long as the judge is satisfied that the coercive
sanction might yet produce its intended result, the confinement may
continue. But if the judge is persuaded, after a conscien-tious
consideration of the circumstances pertinent to the indi-vidual
contemnor, that the contempt power has ceased to have a coercive effect,
the civil contempt remedy should be ended.
Simkin v. United States, supra at 5595.
At the October 14 hearing, petitioner acted pro se, except that her own
examination as a witness was undertaken by counsel who was assisting
her. Petitioner, as a witness, announced her resolve never to cooperate
with the government. Eight addi-tional witnesses testified [*7]
concerning their belief in peti-tioner's unshakable determination never
to obey the grand jury subpoena. Her mother and father based their
conviction that fur-ther incarceration would not make petitioner obey
the court or-der on petitioner's strength of character and
determination, which they contended they had fostered. The other
witnesses who had known her over varying periods and had been
associ-ated with her in political activities testified as to their
certainty of her steadfastness. While some of these witnesses,
particu-larly petitioner's mother and father, were impressive, their
dec-larations could be discounted for the most part as either
self-serving or as insufficiently reliable.
One witness, however, cannot be so readily dismissed. Asha Thornton,
like petitioner, was served with a subpoena to pro-vide handwriting
exemplars and testify before the grand jury.She refused to do either
after being ordered to do so by Judge Brieant and was adjudged in civil
contempt. On Septem-ber 27, 1983, because of his conviction that
Thornton "is so committed to her anti-establishment rhetoric and so
sustained spiritually by the defiance of several others who are in
contempt of the same grand [*8] jury and also confined as civil
contem-nors who call themselves 'grand jury resisters,' that she is...
ready, willing and able to persist in her defiance," Judge Brieant
ordered her discharged from custody. In the Matter of Asha Thornton,
Civil Contemnor, M-11-188, slip op. at pp. 7-8, un-reported. Thornton
had been steadfast in her refusal to comply for a period of some
seventeen months.
I am convinced that petitioner's resolve is as strong and deter-mined as
Thornton's. As noted, petitioner was released from prison to bear a
child. While she and her lawyers made every effort to use the newborn as
basis for petitioner's remaining on furlough, when that failed, she went
back to jail and remained adamant in her refusal to provide the
exemplars and hair sam-ples. The need of the infant for a mother's care
was insufficient to break her will to refuse "to cooperate," as she puts
it.
Her husband was tried as a principal in the so-called Brinks case. He
was recently acquitted and is now free. Still, the fact that she can
join him and her children if she obeys the court or-der has not, thus
far, lessened petitioner's resolve to remain in prison rather than
comply.
Petitioner is [*9] an intelligent and articulate woman. She is convinced
that the oppression and exploitation of blacks in this country is such
that their only prospect of freedom is in a sepa-rate political entity
under black control. She is a member of such a body called, I believe,
the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa. Petitioner's
anti-government pos-ture was fed by the way in which the F.B.I. treated,
or she be-lieves they treated, her and her children when she was
arrested in 1981. She is, I believe, sincerely and deeply committed to a
political philosophy hostile to our government, and is con-vinced that
our government is evil and racist. Any form of co-operation with
government law enforcement officials is un-thinkable and unacceptable to
her. Much of this seems to be mindless raving and ranting to me, and
petitioner's decision to stay incarcerated away from family and friends
when all she is required to do is given the exemplars and hair samples
which she cannot lawfully withhold seems both wasteful and
self-defeating. However, that is beside the point--the issue is will she
bend if kept longer confined? I think not.
If I could view petitioner's behaviour as individualized [*10]
anti-social conduct or as acts personifying a psychotic dysfunc-tion,
continued incarceration could still be regarded as an effec-tive
coercive force.Petitioner, however, is zealously dedicated and deeply
committed to a cause--separatism and self-determination. That cause
dedication and commitment feed and support her determination never to
cooperate with the govern-ment and, like Thornton, that determination
will not bend if she is held ten or twelve months more.
The government cites petitioner's repeated applications to be set free
as evidence that further incarceration may be effective. I cannot regard
these efforts as anything other than petitioner's and her lawyer's
efforts to use the law to beat the system and, indeed, the present
motion is another indicia of that effort. There is no indication, if
this and succeeding efforts fail, that petitioner will voluntarily
supply what the government seeks. Indeed, all evidence up to the present
is to the contrary.
Petitioner does not appear to be, herself, a target of the grand jury
investigation. While that investigation continues, she does not appear
to be central to it. Moreover, petitioner points out that if handwriting
exemplars [*11] are what is desired, offi-cials have ample evidence of
her handwriting. Indeed, when her husband refused to supply such
exemplars, the government found sufficient samples of his handwriting,
inadvertently sup-plied while in custody, for use of its experts at his
trial. The government's response is that since petitioner now knows that
the government might make use of samples of her handwriting on forms in
use at the Metropolitan Correction Center where she is confined, she
might alter her handwriting. I am not per-suaded. Petitioner has been
saying that there were sufficient samples of her writing in the
government's possession for ex-pert analysis since she was first brought
before me in Decem-ber, 1982. I am not convinced that what was done in
her hus-band's case cannot be done in her case if exemplars are what is
needed.
Moreover, six months incarceration, in view of the nature of the
offense, seems a long enough period to determine whether co-ercion will
work. If petitioner were a target of the grand jury or if she could be
said to be directly involved in crimes the grand jury is investigating,
a lengthier incarceration might be required to test petitioner's
resolve. I conclude, [*12] therefore, that further incarceration under
current circumstances would be pu-nitive. Petitioner is ordered
discharged from custody.
IT IS SO ORDERED.
53 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Washington Post
February 21, 1984, Tuesday, Final Edition
A REVOLUTIONARY;
Kathy Boudin Clings to Radicalism While Facing Trial in Brinks Murders
BYLINE: By Margot Hornblower, Washington Post Staff Writer
SECTION: First Section; A1
LENGTH: 2904 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK, N.Y.
Flashbacks: Kathy Boudin, charging into a Chicago police line, hoisting
the Viet Cong flag on a long pole . . . Kathy Boudin, running naked from
the scene of an explosion at a Greenwich Village bomb factory, where
three of her friends were killed . . . Kathy Boudin, her young face
staring from the posters: "Wanted by the FBI--Consider Dangerous" . . .
Kathy Boudin, her back to the camera, reading poetry in an under-ground
film: "A ballooning breath of anger caged in-side/Carefully choosing the
moment of attack."
In the dilapidated Rockland County Jail where she is being held during
her trial for murder and robbery, Kathy Boudin, one of the last domestic
revolutionaries of the 1960s, offered a hearty handshake and a quick
smile.
At 40, she is a small, wiry woman with deep-set blue eyes, chiseled
features and dark hair, with a trace of gray, that cas-cades down to her
shoulders.
"No one believes I am a dangerous person," Boudin said in a rare
interview, arguing that she should be transferred to a more comfortable
jail across the Hudson River from here in White Plains, where her trial
began a week ago in the Westchester County Courthouse. She insisted on
conversing while the radio blared because she suspected the room was
bugged.
She accused local officials of drumming up "political hys-teria" with
exaggerated security. The Westchester courthouse has been ringed with
concrete barricades and its lobby is filled with metal detectors.
Prosecutors said these measures are "reasonable" because Boudin is
charged with participating in the violent 1981 armed robbery of $1.6
million from a Brinks armored truck outside the suburban village of
Nyack.
Two policemen and a guard were gunned down, and head-lines across the
nation revived fears about dangerous revolu-tionary cadres.
Boudin's husband, David J. Gilbert, and her friend, Judith A. Clark,
both former members of the radical Weather Under-ground, and Kuwasi
Balagoon, a member of the Black Libera-tion Army, were convicted last
October of second-degree mur-der in connection with the crime. Boudin,
who was a passenger in a U-Haul used to pick up the gunmen and part of
the money, is being tried separately with ex-convict Samuel Brown.
New York's felony murder statute holds someone guilty of homicide for
participating in a robbery where murder is com-mitted.
Living in a tiny cell here with no light, Boudin said she felt
"discriminated against."
"Historically, the government tries to punish people because they are
protesting things the government does," she said. "It is an effort to
discourage political action. It is part of the same government attitude
which seeks to overthrow Nicaragua and prevent the people of El Salvador
from choosing their own government."
During a visit by a reporter and a photographer, Boudin was dressed in a
purple T-shirt, navy corduroy jeans and loafers. She talked in a deep
voice with animated gestures, easy laugh-ter and enthusiasm.
In jail, she said, she has read "The Color Purple" and other novels by
Alice Walker, as well as "Sandino's Daughters," a book about women in
Nicaragua. She has spent countless hours crocheting, making little
presents for her 3-year-old son, Chesa, vests for her friends and a
red-and-blue cover for her toilet seat.
Most of all, she said, she has appreciated the company of other female
prisoners.
"We talk about each other's problems, whether it's the rela-tionships
with their lovers or other problems in their lives," she said. "I talk
about things that are important to me--my friend-ships, my child. We do
exercises together when I get home from court.
"That's important in terms of our spirits," she said. "There's a sense
of solidarity and a recognition that the government can be brutal."
Boudin's lawyers, including her famous father, civil rights attorney
Leonard Boudin, advised her not to speak about her role in the robbery,
about her years as a fugitive before her ar-rest in 1981, or about her
political beliefs, for fear such talk could prejudice the trial.
However, from the tone of her conversation, her letters and poetry from
jail, interviews with her family and law enforce-ment officials'
accounts, Boudin emerges as a woman whose commitment to radical
political change and redistribution of wealth has remained essentially
unaltered since, at 17, with her father's encouragement, she visited
Havana and marveled at the new revolution of Fidel Castro.
"This is a time when the overall crisis of imperialism is cre-ating the
need for the state to come down harder against all Third World people.
And to mobilize white people against Third World people," Boudin wrote
friends in a letter from jail. "And that has to be opposed."
She has lived a life of contradictions: known to her friends for
gentleness, she yet propounds the need for armed struggle; a devoted
mother, she nonetheless placed herself in a dangerous, illegal
situation; a magna cum laude graduate of Bryn Mawr who speaks four
languages and was accepted at several law schools, she has spent half
her adult life in hiding, working at menial jobs and collecting welfare
under assumed names.
"Kathy is the last vestige of the radical movment of the 1960s," her
father said. "She's the last one who has not taken the safe course
because of a sense of idealism I couldn't share and I would not hope
anyone next to me would share, but she did share."
The Brinks killings led the federal government to reopen its
investigations of radical leftists, largely abandoned in 1976 when the
FBI's widely criticized counterintelligence program was curtailed.
A dozen people went to jail last year for refusing to cooper-ate with
the federal grand jury investigating the Brinks case, related bombings
and murders and the 1979 prison escape of Black Liberation Army leader
Joanne Chesimard.
Law enforcement officials said the Brinks robbery and as many as a dozen
other crimes were committed by a terrorist al-liance between the Black
Liberation Army and supporters of the May 19th Communist Organization, a
group of white radical feminists.
Three men and a woman were sentenced to up to 40 years in federal court
in Manhattan last week in connection with these charges.
Boudin's trial, expected to last at least six months, is the culmination
of this chapter in the bloody history of America's extreme left, a small
band of urban guerrillas that sprang from the civil rights and anti-war
movements of the 1960s.
The three defendants already convicted in the Brinks case, each
sentenced to 70 years in prison, had refused legal counsel and asserted
that the robbery was an "expropriation" to finance an independent, black
Republic of New Afrika in the southern United States and to finance
other anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist activities on behalf of Third
World peoples.
Since the mid-1970s, when the Weather Underground claimed responsibility
for 25 bombings, including those of the U.S. Capitol in 1971 and the
Pentagon in 1972, its members have surrendered one by one to
authorities. Some served time, others not; most eventually married, had
children and settled down to, on the surface at least, normal
middle-class lives.
Boudin was the last of her group to remain underground. Her father said
last week that many discussions with her before her 1981 arrest had
convinced him that "she was going to go above ground."
"The time had come for her, he said. "There were a lot of political
things for her to do if she had been above ground."
With untamed white hair and gaunt face, Leonard Boudin, 71, looks like a
figure from a Daumier sketch. Defender of the Berrigan brothers and the
Harrisburg Seven, he and Kathy's mother, Jean, made their townhouse in
Greenwich Village an intellectual salon of the liberal left. He
represented Castro and played chess with Che Guevara.
All this had a strong influence on Kathy and less, perhaps, on her
brother, Michael, a corporate lawyer at the Washington law firm of
Covington and Burling.
Leonard Boudin, who wears a pacemaker, said he had spent "hundreds of
thousands of dollars" on Kathy's defense in the past 2 1/2 years.
He hired Leonard Weinglass, defender of the Chicago Seven and the
Symbionese Liberation Army; Linda Backiel, a Phila-delphia lawyer who
worked on the Susan Saxe case; Martin Garbus, former associate director
of the American Civil Liber-ties Union, and Jay Shulman, a sociologist,
to do jury research.
It has been a life-and-death struggle, waged with motions and lawsuits
attacking conditions in four different jails, forcing the the severance
of trials and two changes in location, from Rockland to Orange to
Westchester County because of adverse publicity and community outrage at
the murders.
"My parents have really stuck by me, and it is hard to imag-ine the last
two years without their support," Kathy Boudin said.
In the Orange County Jail in Goshen, N.Y., where she was held for
several months, Boudin joined a plaintiffs' committee.
"We demanded to have the right to go outside during the winter," she
said. "We demanded decent diets for pregnant women, not just a bologna
sandwich with white bread. We asked to have books in the visiting room
when our children came."
Her Swahili-named son, Chesa, was being weaned when Boudin was arrested.
She was kept for almost three months in solitary confinement at the
Manhattan Correctional Institute.
In an affidavit challenging such conditions, she wrote, "The MCI forbids
me from touching my 15-month-old baby, Chesa. Judith Clark cannot touch
her 12-month-old baby, either. We are told we cannot touch them because
of security. It is said they might be carrying a weapon in their
Pampers."
". . . We are willing to have our babies searched, but since the prison
administration has decided to punish us, it refuses to reconsider its
policy," she wrote. "At the start of the visit, the Unit Manager . . .
said, 'If you touch your child even once, the visit will be immediately
discontinued.'
"Every time my child would nearly place his hand on my knee, I would
jump away for fear the visit would be discontin-ued . . . ," she
continued. "I could not express my love for my child, and he, of course,
felt that . . . . He could not feel my body. He could not smell me. I
cannot express in words the pain that such cruelty inflicts on both me
and my child."
On Jan. 7, 1982, Federal Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy agreed that
constitutional rights were being violated, holding that "Ms. Boudin, as
a pretrial detainee, is not to be punished."
Boudin was transferred to a state prison in Woodbourne, N.Y. where she
lived with her co-defendents, including her husband, and was allowed to
hold and play with her son.
Kathy's mother brought Chesa to Woodbourne.
"The first time he clung to me and Leonard," Jean Boudin said. "He
wasn't in the slightest bit interested in Kathy. But the second or third
time, he sat on her lap. Then, he reached with his little arm into her
blouse.
"She gave him a bottle. From then on, he wouldn't get off her lap.
Suddenly his whole body remembered her," Jean Boudin recalled. "It was
overwhelming. He cried terribly when he had to leave."
Chesa visted his mother here last week. A round-faced child with curly
blond hair, he chattered happily with Boudin the whole hour, his
bubbling laughter penetrating steel-mesh doors to a waiting room.
Dressed in jeans, sneakers and a blue vest that his mother had crocheted
in jail, he waved cheerfully to the uniformed guard on his way out.
Chesa was accompanied by Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather
Underground. He and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, also a former Weather
Underground leader, have been caring for Chesa in their Upper West Side
apartment.
Ayers, a nursery-school teacher, and Dohrn, a lawyer who is studying for
the New York bar, surfaced in 1980. They have two sons, Malik, named
after Malcolm X, and Zayd, named af-ter Zayd Shakur, a black radical who
died in a gun battle with police.
Jean Boudin, 71, is a poet and a pacifist who devoted herself to
homemaking when her children were growing up. On the wall of her
Greenwich Village home is a photo of Chesa lying happily on his
grandfather's chest.
"That's my Rembrandt," she said. Around the room are more photos of
Chesa, blowing bubbles stark naked and running in a field with Zayd and
Malik.
"Don't they have crazy names?" she asked, a look of puz-zlement crossing
her face. "But that's the in thing. Chesa's in nursery school with Zayd.
They're Chinese, brown, black, pink, everything in that school."
From a file she fished a photocopied letter, signed by Dohrn and another
former Weatherman and several of their children, about making a
"friendship quilt" for Kathy's birthday. Forty-one friends have signed
up to make different squares, she said.
"I'm going to buy by some pretty, narrow tape and use it to sew 'Mother'
on my square," she said.
Jean Boudin recalled in a Ms. Magazine interview in 1976 the New York
opening of Emile de Antonio's film, where she saw Kathy, albeit on
celluloid, for the first time since the 1970 townhouse explosion.
"What did one wear to see 'Underground?' " she found her-self worrying.
"Suppose there was press, how should a Weath-erperson's mother look?"
Kathy remembers her mother in a different context.
"My earliest political memory is from the McCarthy/Cold War period of
the 1950s," she wrote to friends from prison. "When I was 9, an FBI
agent came to the door to ask questions about family friends. My mother,
a tiny woman, backed him out of the door, firmly claiming she had
nothing to say to him.
"I was embarrassed by her rudeness and did not understand," Boudin said.
"She did her best to explain how his seemingly harmless questions were
designed to punish people who had criticisms of the government."
"At the age of 40, Kathy is exactly what she was at 14 or 18," Leonard
Boudin said. "She's the same, warm, thoughtful, concerned person. She's
the same person who worked at a camp for the blind, who fought for civil
rights in the South, for black welfare mothers in Cleveland, who marched
against the bomb, who went to Russia to study literature and loved the
Russian people."
Although pamphlets about the Brinks robbery case have been placed in
bookstores and mailed to friends, Leonard Boudin expressed dismay that
this case, unlike so many others he has fought, has not become a cause
celebre of the left. He attributed this, in part, to what he called the
"right-wing" and "neo-fascist" era of President Reagan.
"The old radicals are scared like the old radicals were in the Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg case," he said. "They're afraid of . . . political
robberies and the death of a policeman."
Nonetheless, Boudin said in discussing his daughter, he finds himself
"frequently angry at her for sacrificing her life in this way.
"It has affected all of us, including her child . . . . She's made
sacrifices most liberals wouldn't think of making," she said.
Jean remembered the night Kathy was arrested, when she and Leonard
brought Chesa home. "We had never heard of Pampers," she said. "I was
reading the instructions by the hall light while Leonard was trying to
put on the Pamper. We didn't know how to undo the stick-um.
"The baby was crying," she recalled. "Leonard kept saying, 'Can't we use
safety pins?' But of course you can't get a safety pin through a Pamper.
It was crazy."
What has bothered her parents and friends, is that, before the Brinks
robbery, Kathy could easily have come above ground and faced only minor
charges in connection with the Chicago "Days of Rage" in 1969.
In a letter to Jane Lazarre, a writer for the Village Voice, Boudin said
she was "torn" over the decision, fearing that to come out of hiding
would be a powerful symbolic blow to her cause.
"I still felt my own personal decision to surface would be one more
contribution to the government's and media propa-ganda campaign that the
sixties were over, people were growing up and coming home and everything
was back to normal, at a time when I felt a need to build a resistance
was more necessary than ever," she wrote.
"At the same time, I felt personally the need to have an ex-change with
a broad array of people. I wanted to be involved in mass organizing,"
she continued. ". . . I wanted to be myself with my own name and an
identity to the people around me in-stead of the fragmented existence I
was living."
For the past 2 1/2 years, Boudin has tried to come to terms with the
fact that she could spend the rest of her life in prison. She received a
letter last week from the Orange County jail say-ing that the prisoners
committee had persuaded officials there to allow outdoor exercise when
the temperature is above 40 de-grees. "It makes me feel like we
accomplished something," she said.
That night, speaking to a reporter on the telephone, Boudin added that
she had the strong support of her co-defendants, Gil-bert, Clark,
Balagoon and Sekou Odinga, a black activist con-victed in the federal
trial.
"During the first two years of isolation, we were under tre-mendous
pressure and confrontation with the government which tried to break us,"
she said. "Our ability to build a culture of resistance allowed us to
survive."
"Culture of resistance" is hard to explain to a 3-year-old who asks why
his mother is in jail.
"We tell him that she's fighting for a better world," Jean Boudin said,
"and we say many mistakes were made."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Picture 1, Kathy Boudin gestures during interview in the
Rockland County Jail chapel; Picture 2, Kathy Boudin's parents, Leonard
and Jean, drew leftist intellectuals to their home. Picture 3, Kathy
Boudin answers a reporter's questions as Linda Backiel, one of her
lawyers and a veteran of the Susan Saxe case, looks on. Photos by Nancy
Kaye for The Washing-ton Post
Copyright 1984 The Washington Post
54 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
February 23, 1984, Thursday, PM cycle
Kathy Boudin: a radical even in prison
SECTION: Washington News
LENGTH: 540 words
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
Kathy Boudin, one of the 1960s' last protest leaders, is in jail facing
murder and robbery charges. Her husband has been sentenced to life in
prison for the same crime and she sees her 3-year-old son only on
visiting days.
Yet, Ms. Boudin, 40, a former leader of the radical Weather Undergound,
remains convinced her path is the right one and has continued her
struggle while in prison in Rockland County, N.Y., awaiting trial.
''Historically, the government tries to punish people because they are
protesting things the government does,'' Ms. Boudin said in an interview
published this week in The Washington Post. ''It is an effort to
discourage political action. It is a part of the same government
attitude which seeks to overthrow Nicara-gua and prevent the people of
El Salvador from choosing their own government.''
Ms. Boudin, and Samuel Brown, 43, an ex-convict from Staten Island, are
charged with robbery and murder stemming from the aborted Oct. 20, 1981,
attack on a Brink's armored car. Two policemen and a Brink's guard were
killed in a shoot-out that followed.
The Post said Ms. Boudin was weaning her Swahili-named son, Chesa, when
she was arrested. The child, who now stays with former Weather
Underground leader Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, in a New
York City apartment, sees Ms. Boudin only on visiting days.
A trial in October ended in convictions for Ms. Boudin's husband, David
Gilbert, and Judith Clark, also former members of the Weather
Underground, and Kuwasi Balagoon, a member of Black Liberation Army. The
three were charged with second-degree murder and each was sentenced to
serve a minimum of 75 years in prison.
Ms. Boudin, who at 17 visited Havana to view Fidel Castro's
revolutionary Cuba, is a graduate of Bryn Mawr. She has spent half her
adult life in hiding, been featured on wanted posters by the FBI and
narrowly escaped death when a Greenwich Village bomb factory blew up
killing three of her friends.
''Kathy is the last vestige of the radical movement of the 1960s,'' her
father, Leonard, 71, told the Post. ''She's the last one who has not
taken the safe course because of a sense of ideal-ism I couldn't share
and I would not hope anyone next to me would share, but she did share.''
A well known civil rights attorney, who has represented Castro and the
Berrigan brothers and played chess with Che Guevara, Boudin told the
paper he had spent ''hundreds of thou-sands of dollars'' on his
daughter's defense.
Ms. Boudin, meanwhile, spends her time fomenting revolu-tion in prison.
While held in a jail in Goshen, N.Y., she joined a committee that fought
for outdoor exercise for prisoners in the winter, a change in the
prison's menu and books in the visiting room for children.
''During the first two years of isolation (in prison), we were under
tremendous pressure and confrontation with the govern-ment which tried
to break us,'' she told the Post. ''Our ability to build a culture of
resistance allowed us to survive.''
Currently imprisoned in Rockland County, her lawyers are seeking to move
her to a jail in Westchester County. Her trial is to be held in White
Plains in the county adjacent to New York City and preliminary screening
of jurors has begun.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 U.P.I.
55 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
April 26, 1984, Thursday, BC cycle
Kathy Boudin pleads guilty to murder
BYLINE: By ANDREW BLUM
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 524 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
Former Weather Underground leader Kathy Boudin pleaded guilty Thursday
to one count of murder and one count of rob-bery stemming from the 1981
Brink's armored car holdup.
''I feel terrible about the lives of the people lost in the inci-dent,''
Ms. Boudin said after entering the surprise plea before state Supreme
Court Justice David Ritter in the Westchester County courthouse.
The bungled $1.6 million robbery resulted in the death of a Brink's
guard and two Rockland County policeman who died in a roadblock
shootout.
Her father attorney Leonard Boudin, who has acted as Ms. Boudin's
lawyer, and her mother, Jean, stood at her side as she pleaded guilty to
second-degree murder and first-degree rob-bery.
Bernardine Dohrn, another former Weather Underground radical who has
been taking care of Ms. Boudin's 3-year-old son, also was in the court.
Ritter indicated he would sentence Ms. Boudin to a term of
20-years-to-life and said she would not be eligible for parole until the
year 2001.
Ms. Boudin, 40, who escaped a 1970 ''bomb factory'' explo-sion in New
York's Greenwich Village, is on trial with Samuel Brown, 40, for their
part in the Oct. 20, 1981, Brink's armored car holdup in Rockland.
The bungled robbery brought Ms. Boudin to the surface af-ter 11 years of
living underground. Three other co-defendants -- including Ms. Boudin's
husband David Gilbert -- were con-victed in the case last fall and are
serving jail terms of 75 years to life.
Before her capture, the last time she was seen in public was when she
ran naked from a Greenwich Village apartment that was doubling as a
Weather Underground bomb factory. The factory exploded, killing three of
her radical colleagues.
Most of the top Weatherman long since surrendered to au-thorities but
Miss Boudin remained at large until the bloody shootout in Nyack, N.Y.,
when she ran up to an off-duty New York City corrections officer and
gave herself up.
At the private schools she attended in New York, she was described as a
bright student and good athlete. Her commitment to radical politics
emerged once she went to college. At Bryn Mawr, an exclusive liberal
arts college in a Philadelphia suburb, she became active in the civil
rights movement of the early 1960s.
She spent 1965, her senior year, at the University of Mos-cow and lived
for a time in Leningrad.
During the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, she was arrested and
charged with tossing a ''stink bomb.'' She was also named as a
co-conspirator in a federal indictment against the Chicago Seven.
She soon became a leading force in the radical Weatherman movement and
was indicted with 11 other members on charges stemming from the ''Days
of Rage'' -- the 1969 student rampage through the streets of Chicago.
In late 1969, she and about 100 other members of the group went
''underground'' and planned a bombing campaign aimed at bringing down
''the system.''
On March 6, 1970, a tremendous explosion ripped apart a Greenwich
Village townhouse that police said the group had used as a ''bomb
factory.'' Three people were killed in the blast, but Miss Boudin was
seen leaving shortly afterwards.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 U.P.I.
56 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
April 26, 1984, Thursday, BC cycle
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 719 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
Former Weather Underground fugitive Kathy Boudin pleaded guilty Thursday
to murder and robbery in the 1981 Brink's armored car holdup in which
two police officers and a guard were killed.
Standing next to her father, civil liberties lawyer Leonard Boudin, Miss
Boudin read a prepared statement in which she said she regretted the
holdup.
"I feel terrible about the lives that were lost as a result of this
incident," Miss Boudin said. "I have led a life committed to po-litical
principles. I believe I can be true to these principles in various ways
without engaging in violent acts."
The plea came as a jury was being selected to try Miss Boudin on three
charges of murder in connection with the 1981 robbery of an rmored car
and the killing of a Brink's guard and two Nyack policemen.
Judge David Ritter said he would sentence Miss Boudin, 40, to a term of
20 years to life in prison. She has already served 30 months, and would
be eligible for parole in the year 2001.
Ritter said he was accepting the guilty plea in full satisfac-tion of
the 13-count indictment, which accused Miss Boudin and several other
people of three counts of murder, robbery and other charges in the Oct.
20, 1981, holdup at a shopping mall in Rockland County.
Ritter said that by pleading guilty, Miss Boudin was forever waiving her
right to the trial and to any appeal of her plea.
The judge said he would not accept the plea unless per-suaded that Miss
Boudin was actually guilty and asked her "What is it you did?"
In her statement, Miss Boudin detailed her involvement in the bungled
$1.6 million holdup, in which she said it was her job to wait at a
switch point a distance away from the robbery with the getaway vehicles.
Until her capture in the Brink's case, Miss Boudin was last seen fleeing
naked from a 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Vil-lage townhouse police
said was used by radicals as a bomb fac-tory.
She spent 10 years in the Weather Underground, which claimed
responsibility for bombings of public buildings during that turbulent
period, but was quoted in an interview recently as saying she was a
woman who "has made mistakes."
Samuel Brown, 43, Miss Boudin's co-defendant in the Brink's case, sat an
adjacent table and listened intently today as she recounted the events,
in which witnesses have said Brown was a principal gunman. His trial
will continue.
Three other defendants _ Judith Clark, 33; Kuwasi Bala-goon, 36; and
David Gilbert, 39 _ were convicted of the crime Sept. 14 by an Orange
County jury. Miss Boudin married Gil-bert, with whom she has a
3-year-old son, in a jailhouse cere-mony on the day of his conviction.
Unlike that trio, Miss Boudin's lawyers had mounted a vig-orous
conventional legal defense. They claimed that Miss Boudin was not at the
robbery scene in Nanuet.
And although the truck in which she was a passenger carried armed gunmen
who burst out and fired upon the police officers at the roadblock after
the holdup, Miss Boudin's lawyers said she did not know what her fellow
passengers were planning.
Miss Boudin said her role in the robbery was to "wait in the parking
lot" at the switch point. When the suspects fleeing the holdup arrived
there, they jumped into several vehicles, includ-ing a U-Haul truck in
which Miss Boudin was a passenger.
It was that truck that police pulled over at a roadblock mo-ments later.
Gunmen jumped out of the back firing.
"I knew, given the nature of the incident, the other individu-als would
be armed," she said.
Miss Boudin then related how she jumped out of the truck with "my arms
raised."
"Moments later, the shooting began," she said.
But Miss Boudin insisted, "I was unarmed throughout."
Miss Boudin was neatly dressed in a wool skirt and vest and answered in
a strong voice in the Westchester County court-room which was crowded
with law enforcement officers and Miss Boudin's friends and family.
She turned around once and smiled at her mother, Jean, in the back of
the courtroom and to Bernardine Dohrn, a former member of the Weatherman
organization, who now is the legal guardian of Miss Boudin's 3-year-old
son, Chesa.
Ritter set May 3 as the sentencing date.
Miss Boudin's trial was twice moved by a state appeals court because of
pretrial publicity the defense said had biased poten-tial jurors against
her.
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57 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
April 26, 1984, Thursday, AM cycle
Kathy Boudin Pleads Guilty, Gets 20 To Life
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 877 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
In a surprise plea bargain, onetime Weather Underground leader Kathy
Boudin pleaded guilty Thursday to murder and robbery stemming from the
1981 holdup of a Brink's truck. "I feel terrible about the lives that
were lost," she said.
Westchester County Court Judge David Ritter said he would sentence the
40-year-old former fugitive May 3 to a term of 20 years-to-life in
prison on her guilty plea to one count each of murder and robbery. She
could be paroled in the year 2001.
She could have faced 75 years to life if convicted of all 13 counts she
faced.
Standing next to her father, civil liberties lawyer Leonard Boudin, Miss
Boudin read a statement in which she said she re-gretted the $1.6
million holdup and its aftermath, in which two policemen and a guard
were killed.
"I feel terrible about the lives that were lost as a result of this
incident," Miss Boudin said. "I have led a life committed to po-litical
principles. I believe I can be true to these principles in various ways
without engaging in violent acts."
But she insisted that her role in the crimes was limited _ she was
unarmed, she said _ and according to her lawyer, she has no intention of
testifying against others accused in the episode.
"Kathy is a strong person who's made deliberate choices. She made a big
one today," said the lawyer, Leonard Wein-glass.
The plea came as a jury was being selected to try Miss Boudin. The judge
said he would not accept the plea unless per-suaded that Miss Boudin was
actually guilty. He asked her, "What is it you did?"
In her statement, Miss Boudin detailed her involvement in the bungled
holdup. It was her job, she said, to wait with get-away vehicles at a
switch point, a distance away from the rob-bery.
Ritter said he accepted the plea because there was "no evi-dence Miss
Boudin ever participated in a violent crime," Hers was a "secondary
role," the judge said, and her plea would bring a "just end to this
expensive and lengthy litigation."
"Also significant is that she is reported to be remorseful and contrite
about the deaths and injuries ... That sets her apart from those
previously sentenced," he said.
Three other defendants _ Judith Clark, 33; Kuwasi Bala-goon, 36; and
David Gilbert, 39 _ were convicted Sept. 14 of the crime by an Orange
County jury. Miss Boudin married Gil-bert, with whom she has a
3-year-old son, in a jailhouse cere-mony on the day of his conviction.
Each of those defendants was sentenced to 75-years-to-life _ three
consecutive terms for the three murders. If she had been convicted of
all the charges against her, Miss Boudin almost certainly would have
faced the same.
Prior to her capture in the Brink's case, Miss Boudin was last seen
fleeing naked from a 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse
police said was used by radicals as a bomb factory.
She spent 10 years in the Weather Underground, which bombed public
buildings during that time of turmoil, but was quoted in an interview
recently as saying she was a woman who "has made mistakes."
Samuel Brown, 43, Miss Boudin's co-defendant, sat an adja-cent table and
listened intently Thursday as she recounted the events, in which
witnesses have said Brown was a principal gunman. His trial will
continue.
Miss Boudin said her role in the robbery was to "wait in the parking
lot" at the switch point. When the suspects fleeing the holdup arrived
there, they jumped into several vehicles, includ-ing a U-Haul truck in
which Miss Boudin was a passenger.
It was that truck that police pulled over at a roadblock mo-ments later.
"I knew, given the nature of the incident, the other individu-als would
be armed," she said. She jumped out of the truck with "my arms raised."
"Moments later, the shooting began," she said. Police say the gunmen
were firing their weapons when they jumped out of the truck.
"I was unarmed throughout," Miss Boudin insisted.
Miss Boudin was neatly dressed in a wool skirt and vest. She answered in
a strong voice in a Westchester County court-room crowded with law
enforcement officers and Miss Boudin's friends and family.
She turned around once and smiled at her mother, Jean, in the back of
the courtroom and to Bernardine Dohrn, a former member of the
Weathermen, who now is the legal guardian of Miss Boudin's son, Chesa.
After the court session, Weinglass tried to explain Miss Boudin's plea.
"Kathy never contended that she was an innocent. She merely contended
she was not as guilty as they said she was," he said.
Since the crime, Weinglass said, Miss Boudin had been por-trayed
publicly as a terrorist _ her trial was moved twice due to prejudicial
pre-trial publicity. It was only within the past month that her lawyers
and authorities were able to negotiate in a rea-sonable atmosphere, he
said.
Kenneth Gribetz, Rockland County district attorney, said he was pleased
with the end result. "She's behind bars for 20 years. She's been
punished. It's an appropriate punishment," he said.
Leonard Boudin, in a brief meeting with the media after the session,
tried to collect his thoughts.
His daughter's life, he said, has been "devoted to the welfare of
humanity ... I have never known Kathy to be anything other than
idealistic, honest and selfless. This case doesn't change my view."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
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All Rights Reserved
58 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
April 27, 1984, Friday, PM cycle
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 673 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
Once-defiant radical fugitive Kathy Boudin, now remorseful and saying
she renounces violence, must spend the next 17 years in prison after
admitting her role in the 1981 Brink's ar-mored car robbery and murders.
Her plea of guilty to murder and robbery Thursday was "a bolt out of the
blue," in the words of prosecutor Kenneth Gribetz.
Miss Boudin, 40, avoided a possible prison sentence that would have
carried virtually no hope of parole. But she must still be imprisoned
until the year 2,001.
Two police officers and a guard were shot to death in the bungled $1.6
million holdup in Rockland County, about 20 miles north of New York
City, and Miss Boudin said she re-gretted their deaths.
"I feel terrible about the lives that were lost as a result of this
incident," Miss Boudin said, as her father, civil liberties attor-ney
Leonard Boudin, stood stiffly at her side and her mother Jean wept from
a row in the back.
Miss Boudin bore little resemblance to the defiant woman who smiled at a
courtroom of supporters chanting revolutionary slogans at her early
court proceedings.
Speaking softly, Miss Boudin said she had "led a life com-mitted to
political principles" and "can be true to these princi-ples in various
ways without engaging in violent acts."
Miss Boudin pleaded guilty to a charge of murder and one of robbery for
"acting in concert" with the others indicted. She had faced the
possibility of a prison sentence of 75-years-to-life if a jury found her
guilty of the triple murders and robbery. Plea bargaining began two
weeks ago, said her lawyer, Leonard Weinglass.
In court Miss Boudin said her role during the Oct. 20, 1981, Brink's
holdup was limited to helping with an exchange of get-away vehicles.
Until her capture at a police roadblock, Miss Boudin had last been seen
fleeing naked from a 1970 explosion of a Greenwich Village townhouse
police said was used by radicals as a bomb factory.
She spent 10 years in the Weather Underground, which claimed
responsibility for bombings of public buildings. She was quoted in
interviews recently as saying she was a woman who "has made mistakes."
Miss Boudin said in her courtroom statement that she was unarmed during
the Brink's heist but admitted that she knew her companions "would be
armed."
Judge David Ritter, presiding in Westchester County Court, said he
accepted her guilty plea because he was satisfied she had "a secondary
role" in the crime and "is reported to be re-morseful and contrite about
the deaths and injuries."
"Kathy never contended that she was an innocent," her law-yer Leonard
Weinglass said outside of court later. "She merely contended she was not
as guilty as they said she was."
Authorities said the holdup was staged by a band of '60s radicals turned
terrorists.
Three defendants _ Judith Clark, 33, Kuwasi Balagoon, 36, and David
Gilbert, 39, who is Miss Boudin's husband _ were convicted last Sept. 14
and are now serving 75-year-to-life terms. The trial of Miss Boudin's
co-defendant, Samuel Brown, 43, which was in the final stage of jury
selection, will continue.
Other suspects are being sought in the case, but Weinglass said Miss
Boudin's plea bargaining arrangement, in which the remaining 11 counts
of her indictment will be dropped, does not include any provision for
Miss Boudin to turn informant.
Gribetz, the Rockland County district attorney prosecuting the case,
said only that he was satisfied with the guilty plea and the judge's
promise that he would sentence Miss Boudin to 20-years-to-life in prison
on May 3. She will be given credit for the 30 months already served.
"She will be confined for most of the balance of her life," Gribetz
said. "This will serve as a deterrent to others who wish to assist
terrorist groups."
Miss Boudin seemed composed in court Thursday, occa-sionally turning
around to smile at her mother and at Bernar-dine Dohrn, another former
member of the Weatherman or-ganization. Miss Dohrn and her husband, Bill
Ayers, are the legal guardians of Miss Boudin's 3-year-old son.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
59 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
April 27, 1984, Friday, Late City Final Edition
KAHTY BOUDIN, IN REVERSAL, PLEADS GUILTY TO '81 HOLDUP AND SLAYINGS
BYLINE: By JAMES FERON, Special to the New York Times
SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 1335 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, April 26
Kathy Boudin, in a dramatic reversal, pleaded guilty today to murder and
robbery charges in the 1981 Brink's holdup in which a guard and two
police officers were slain.
Miss Boudin, speaking in a low, firm voice, told of her role in the
Rockland County robbery and killings and of her remorse over the
consequences.
''I feel terrible about the lives that were lost,'' she told Judge David
S. Ritter. ''I have led a life of commitment to political principles,
and I think I can be true to those principles without engaging in
violent acts.''
20 Years to Life
Judge Ritter said he would sentence the 40-year-old Miss Boudin next
Thursday to 20 years to life in prison. Since Miss Boudin has already
spent three years in prison, she will be eli-gible for parole in 2001.
If she had gone to trial and been found guilty, she would probably have
been sentenced to 25 years to life on each of three counts of murder,
terms that she probably would have had to serve consecutively.
With Miss Boudin's guilty plea, only one of the Brink's de-fendants
remains to be tried. The plea came in a crowded but hushed courtroom in
Westchester County Court, where the case was moved because of pretrial
publicity. Miss Boudin's mother, Jean, sat three rows back, composed and
surrounded by friends. One of them was Bernardine Dohrn, like Miss
Boudin a former member of the radical Weather Underground organization.
Miss Dohrn is now the legal guardian of Miss Boudin's 3-year-old son,
Chesa.
Accord With Prosecutor
Kenneth A. Gribetz, the Rockland County District Attorney, said Miss
Boudin's attorneys had approached him last week seeking agreement on a
lesser sentence for a guilty plea. The talks, which later included Judge
Ritter, continued until 11 this morning.
Leonard I. Weinglass, who has been Miss Boudin's principal attorney,
said after the court session that the defendant had sought to plead
guilty only to the robbery charge, which could have brought a term of 8
1/2 to 25 years, but that Mr. Gribetz had insisted on Miss Boudin also
pleading guilty to at least one count of murder as well.
Mr. Weinglass said a key factor in the arrangement was the provision of
the felony murder law that a participant in a felony where a murder is
committed is also guilty of the murder. In this case, the felony is the
$1.6 million holdup of the armored truck outside the Nanuet Mall on Oct.
20, 1981 by a group of self-styled radicals. Miss Boudin said she had
not been a par-ticipant in the slayings, but had played a role in
driving one of the getaway vehicles.
Mr. Weinglass said, ''It's not so much a matter of comparing her 20
years to 25 years,'' the minimum time she would have served for a murder
conviction, ''but comparing 20 years to 75 years,'' the minimum term for
three consecutive murder convic-tions. For Mr. Gribetz, the plea bargain
represents an end to what might have proved to be a troublesome case
against Miss Boudin. The prosecution had conceded that Miss Boudin did
not carry a gun or shoot anybody. But Mr. Gribetz would have tried to
show, through tiny glass fragments found in her cloth-ing, that she was
present during the holdup.
The prosecution had no witnesses who could place Miss Boudin at the
robbery scene. In court today, she said that while she had been a
passenger in one of the vehicles used to flee the scene, she had emerged
from the car with her hands up at a roadblock in Nyack and had not been
involved in the slaying of the two police officers there.
Mr. Gribetz said he had been ''surprised that they ap-proached us last
Thursday.'' The prosecutor said he had con-ferred with the families of
the slain police officers about the proposed plea. ''We all agreed that
justice would be done with this result,'' he said. ''It's a very strong
sentence.''
Judge Ritter said he had accepted Miss Boudin's guilty plea in full
satisfaction of the 13 charges against her.
Mr. Gribetz said he would continue to prosecute the case against Samuel
Brown, Miss Boudin's co-defendant.
Differences in Cases
''Our evidence is that he killed the police officers; the cases can't be
compared,'' Mr. Gribetz said.
After today's plea, Miss Boudin was permitted to confer with her father,
the lawyer Leonard Boudin, and her mother. As he left the heavily
guarded eighth-floor courtroom, Mr. Boudin was asked if his daughter
felt relieved that the case was over.
''In one sense, everyone is relieved to end a certain aspect of one's
life,'' he said. ''The case is now behind us.'' Then he thought for a
moment, looked at his wife, and said, ''I can't be objective about it.
She's not just a client; she's a daughter.''
Miss Boudin, who will be eligible for parole when she is 58, searched
for familiar faces in the courtroom before the session, as she had done
regularly since the court sessions began. Her co-defendant, Mr. Brown,
maintained his usual impassive man-ner as he sat at a table to her left.
Mr. Gribetz and his aides sat at the right.
2,600 Potential Jurors
That had been the setting since mid- February, when jury se-lection and
pretrial hearings began. More than 2,600 potential jurors were screened
in two stages to produce a panel of West-chester residents who claimed
neither hardship nor bias in the case.
A final panel of 12 jurors with four alternates will be se-lected, now
only to hear Mr. Brown's case, after hearings that are under way to
determine if Mr. Brown is competent to stand trial.
Although few of the potential jurors testified that they had read of Mr.
Brown, many knew of Miss Boudin. Some recalled that she was an alumna of
Bryn Mawr College, from which she graduated in of 1965; others
recognized her father as a noted civil rights lawyer, and many
associated her with the 1970 ex-plosion of a Greenwich Village town
house that was being used by radicals as a bomb factory. Three people
died in the blast.
Outside the courtroom today, Mr. Boudin had other memo-ries of his
daughter in the years before the blast at the town house. He recalled
her working with poor people and with the blind in high school, and
organizing a civil rights conference in the South.
Mr. Weinglass, speaking to another knot of reporters, said that
throughout this and earlier Brink's trials, Miss Boudin ''was offered a
lenient sentence if she would cooperate'' with prosecutors. ''But she
refused, so now she will spend the rest of her life in jail,'' he said.
Mr. Gribetz said he did not plan to call Miss Boudin to tes-tify in Mr.
Brown's trial.
The Brink's robbery attracted widespread interest, largely because most
of the defendants had been identified as members of the Black Panthers,
the Black Liberation Army and the Weather Underground, radical groups
long out of public view.
Although the robbery and murders took place in Rockland County, the
first trial was moved to Judge Ritter's Orange County courtroom after a
state appeals court ruled that the de-fendants could not get a fair
trial because of heavy local public-ity and extraordinary security
measures.
After Miss Boudin's and Mr. Brown's cases were severed, three other
defendants, Judith A. Clark, 33, Kuwasi Balagoon, 36, and David Gilbert,
39, were convicted last September of murder, robbery and lesser charges
and sentenced to 75 years to life in prison. Miss Boudin married Mr.
Gilbert, the father of her child, in a jailhouse ceremony on the day of
his conviction.
Earlier in September, a Federal jury in Manhattan found four others
guilty of conspiracy, racketeering and lesser offenses in the Brink's
case and other holdups. They received sentences of up to 40 years in
prison.
Defendants in those trials, calling themselves ''political pris-oners''
and ''freedom fighters,'' had ignored or rejected lawyers seeking to
defend them, instead choosing what came to be known as revolutionary
defenses. Miss Boudin and Mr. Brown, by contrast, chose to be
represented by lawyers and have avoided courtroom outbursts.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: photo of parents of Boudin (page B4); drawing
Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company
60 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
April 27, 1984, Friday, PM cycle
In His Daughter, Leonard Boudin Finds His Toughest Case
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 696 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.
Attorney Leonard Boudin stood with the defendant before the judge, as he
has with many others for many years. But this wasn't any other
defendant. It was his only daughter, and she was pleading guilty to
murder.
With his wife sitting a few rows away weeping and holding pictures of
her grandson, Boudin stood stiffly at the defense ta-ble as his
daughter, Kathy, agreed to a plea bargain that will keep her in prison
and away from her family until the year 2001.
It was perhaps the toughest courtroom moment ever for the prominent
71-year-old civil liberties lawyer, who only two days earlier had been
arguing a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Judge David Ritter, presiding Thursday as Miss Boudin pleaded guilty to
murder and robbery in the 1981 Brink's holdup, looked up from his bench
at one point to tell Boudin, "I am sure this is a difficult day for you,
sir."
"Yes, it is," Boudin replied, as his daughter stared straight ahead.
Boudin and his wife, Jean, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
since their daughter's arrest 30 months ago. They have traveled long
distances to attend court sessions and show their support.
Boudin hired a team of top lawyers who mounted a pro-longed and
sophisticated defense. They sought and won changes of venue. They
challenged scientific evidence offered by the prosecution in preliminary
hearings. They scrutinized prospective jurors.
Now it was all over. With jury selection incomplete, Miss Boudin decided
to avoid a trial and plead guilty in the bungled $1.6 million holdup of
a Brink's truck that left a guard and two police officers dead.
Three people, including Miss Boudin's husband David Gil-bert, had
already been convicted and are serving 75-years-to-life sentences. The
trial of Miss Boudin's codefendant, Samuel Brown, will continue.
Outside of court, Boudin was somber and bemused as he spoke to reporters
of his daughter's decision to plead guilty.
"I can't look at this thing just as a lawyer. She's not just a client.
This is a daughter," he said, eyes glistening.
Mrs. Boudin, who had sat in the back of courtroom crying softly and
fingering photographs of Miss Boudin's 3-year-old son, did not speak.
Boudin earlier in the week had been arguing in the Supreme Court against
government restrictions on travel to Cuba. In a long career, he has
defended anti-war activists like Dr. Benja-min Spock and the Berrigan
brothers, and represented Paul Robeson in his battle to win a passport
after the entertainer was touched by McCarthyism.
Though his daughter had been an opponent of the legal sys-tem he
embraced, Boudin spoke with pride of her activities as a youth in
political and social issues.
"In the very early days of high school, she worked with poor people," he
said. "At Bryn Mawr, she organized a two-day con-ference on civil
rights."
Then came her involvement with Students for a Democratic Society and the
radical Weather Underground. Arrests in vio-lent demonstrations
followed, and in 1970 she fled naked from an explosion in a Greenwich
Village townhouse. Authorities said it was a radical bomb factory. an
Miss Boudin became a fugitive until her arrest in the Brink's case.
Boudin acknowledged that his daughter had chosen a differ-ent path to
express her beliefs than he had as a lawyer, but he said he did not
fault her.
"I have lived a somewhat different life, yet I can say she really is a
wonderful human being," he said. "As I have viewed Kathy's almost 41
years of life, I see it basically as a life de-voted to the welfare of
humanity."
His wife, a petite, gray-haired woman, would speak only about her
grandson, Chesa, the child of Miss Boudin and Gil-bert.
The boy is being raised by Bernardine Dohrn, Miss Boudin's former
compatriot in the Weather Underground.
"He's a happy child," Mrs. Boudin said, displaying the pho-tographs,
which show the boy as he enjoyed cupcakes at his third birtthday party.
Like the rest of Miss Boudin's family, Chesa's only contact with her
will be jailhouse visits. By the time Miss Boudin can apply for release,
her son will be 21.
"He asks questions, but he doesn't understand," Mrs. Boudin said. And
softly, she began to cry.
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GRAPHIC: With Laserphoto
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61 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
April 28, 1984, Saturday, AM cycle
Kathy Boudin Was Revolutionary Who Returned To System She Scorned
BYLINE: By EILEEN PUTMAN, Associated Press Writer
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 946 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A child of wealth steeped in leftist politics, Kathy Boudin became the
revolutionary her parents were not. She worked in ghettos, visited
Communist countries, denounced her govern-ment.
She was a star of the Weather Underground, a woman who forsook what her
circles called "white skin privilege" in order to change a flawed
society. There were bombings, years on the lam, angry communiques from
underground.
But in the end, she returned to her roots and the system she scorned.
Miss Boudin, 40, pleaded guilty last week to murder and robbery in the
Oct. 20, 1981, Brink's armored car holdup in Rockland County in which
two police officers and a guard were killed.
The plea bargain avoided the possibility of a 75-year-to-life sentence,
but it will keep her in prison until the year 2001. Her son Chesa will
be 21 years old before he sees his mother freed.
Miss Boudin was neatly dressed in a long wool skirt and sweater vest
that would have befitted a professor at Bryn Mawr, the elite college she
attended, or the lawyer she once thought she might become.
Her statement was carefully worded. Her role in the crime was a minor
one, she said, limited to waiting with getaway ve-hicles for the fleeing
robbers.
It was the safest course. Unlike her husband, David Gilbert, who is
serving 75 years for the holdup, Miss Boudin now has prospects of
eventual freedom.
It will be a long time to wait, almost as long as Miss Boudin spent in
her revolutionary pursuits.
During Miss Boudin's childhood, her parents' townhouse in Greenwich
Village became a salon for leftist luminaries. Her father, noted civil
liberties lawyer Leonard Boudin, defended targets of McCarthyism and
later, anti-war activists like Dr. Benjamin Spock and the Berrigan
brothers.
Miss Boudin became politically active at an early age. Her father
recalled proudly last week in a conversation with report-ers how she
worked with poor people in high school and went on to organize civil
rights conferences and demonstrations at Bryn Mawr.
In her college years, she traveled to Moscow and Cuba and returned to
work in a Cleveland slum with welfare mothers.
Then came her involvement with the Weathermen, a faction of Students for
a Democratic Society that became increasingly violent during the
anti-war protests of the late '60s.
Its spinoff, the Weather Underground Organization, was formed as a
secret guerrilla army. The group claimed reponsi-bility for bombings at
public buildings that symbolized gov-ernment authority. Miss Boudin was
said to have been a leader of the organization's New York cell.
On March 6, 1970, Miss Boudin was seen fleeing naked from an explosion
in a Greenwich Village townhouse police said was used by the radicals as
a bomb factory. She spent the next 11 years as a fugitive.
Those in the underground lived under false names and worked at odd jobs.
There was a network of "safe houses" and communes, according to those
who surfaced later.
Among them were Mark Rudd, Cathlyn Wilkerson, Jane Al-pert, Bernardine
Dohrn, Abbie Hoffman. Tired of life on the run, they wanted to live
openly with their families and children.
But Miss Boudin remained underground, living on welfare with her child
under an assumed name in an apartment in upper Manhattan.
On Oct. 20, 1981, an off-duty corrections officer captured her as she
fled the bloody shootout after the Brink's robbery. That was turning
point in her revolution.
From the moment of her arrest, she took a different path from her
associates. At her capture she shouted, "I didn't shoot him, he did!"
and was reported to have gestured in the direction of an associate.
In early court appearances Miss Boudin was defiant, smiling at
supporters chanting revolutionary slogans.
But that soon changed.
Gilbert and two other defendants called themselves "free-dom fighters"
and said they did not recognize the government's right to try them.
Miss Boudin's father would have none of that.He hired top lawyers with
liberal credentials, among them Leonard Wein-glass, a defense lawyer in
the Chicago 7 conspiracy trial and a veteran of radical causes.
Weinglass filed a spate of motions challenging the prosecu-tion's
evidence. He won Miss Boudin a separate trial from the three others, who
were convicted last year. He also won her two changes of venue.
In February, when jury selection for Miss Boudin's trial be-gan,
Weinglass proffered a complex set of legal defenses he said last week
could have won his client acquittal on at least two of the three murder
charges. That could have meant 25 years to life.
But over it all hung the specter of the 75-year-to-life sen-tence Miss
Boudin faced if the verdict was guilty. The judge had imposed
consecutive sentences on the others for each of the three murders.
When the prosecution indicated a receptiveness to plea-bargaining, the
time for abandoning the revolution apparently was at hand.
Miss Boudin entered her plea in a low strong voice, as her mother wept
in the back of a courtroom. Miss Boudin's father stood by her side.
"I feel terrible about the lives that were lost as a result of this
incident," she said. "I have led a life committed to political
principles. I believe I can be true to those principles in various ways
without engaging in violent acts."
Her plea can never be appealed, and no amount of good be-havior in
prison will reduce the sentence.
Miss Boudin has vowed to continue in prison her commit-ment to political
issues, but without violence. Her life is not over, only a phase of it.
"She's a person who doesn't give up. She will write, she will speak in
prison. She has an identity," said Weinglass. "Always in loss, there is
a gain."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
62 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
May 4, 1984, Friday, Late City Final Edition
KATHY BOUDIN GIVEN 20 YEARS TO LIFE IN PRISON
BYLINE: By JAMES FERON
SECTION: Section B; Page 4, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 905 words
DATELINE: WHITE PLAINS, May 3
Kathy Boudin was sentenced today to 20 years to life in prison for her
role in the 1981 Brink's holdup in which a guard and two police officers
were slain.
The 40-year-old defendant, who will be 58 years old when eligible for
parole, turned to relatives of the victims sitting in the crowded
courtroom and said: ''I know that anything I say now will sound hollow,
but I extend to you my deepest sympa-thy. I feel real pain.''
She said she also mourned for one of the robbers, Samuel Smith, who died
in a shootout two days after the holdup. She referred to him as a ''new
African, Mtyari Shabaka Sundiata.''
Reflections of a Radical
Addressing the spectators in the courtroom, Miss Boudin then spoke of
her motivations. ''I was there out of my commit-ment to the black
liberation struggle and its underground movement,'' she said. ''I am a
white person who does not want the crimes committed against black people
to be carried in my name.''
''Looking back on 12 years underground and forward to at least 20 more
years in jail, all because of political conviction, I cannot help but
reflect on my life.'' she said. ''Fundamental change is long and hard,
and setbacks from mistakes are as much a part of that process as
victories.''
The defendant, who had faced three consecutive sentenced of 25 years to
life in prison if found guilty of the three deaths, pleaded guilty last
Thursday in return for the shorter sentence.
Kenneth Gribetz, the Rockland County District Attorney, had agreed that
she was not directly involved in any of the kill-ings.
An 'Active Participant'
But he recalled in the 30-minute session today in Orange County Court
that she had been an ''active participant'' in the holdup.
Speaking before Judge David S. Ritter passed sentence, Mr. Gribetz said
Miss Boudin came to Rockland County ''knowing there would be a robbery''
and that ''other participants would be armed.''
Therefore, he said, she is as responsible for the death of Pe-ter Paige,
the slain Brink's guard, ''as the person who fired the lethal bullet.''
It is thus incumbent upon this court, he said, ''to punish her, and
punish her severely, for her actions.''
Mr. Gribetz said courts had indicated that a sentence should serve three
purposes: to punish the offender in a manner appro-priate to the crime,
to rehabilite the offender, if possible, and to deter others from
engaging in similar criminal activity. The sen-tence in this case, he
said, will satisfy that threefold aim.
''It will effectively result in her incarceration for the better part of
the remainder of her natural life,'' he said, ''and to the ex-tent a
prison sentence can appropriately punish the defendant for her actions,
I believe the term to be imposed by the court is appropriate.''
Sitting several rows directly behind Mr. Gribetz was Diane O'Grady,
whose husband, Sgt. Edward O'Grady, was killed, with Officer Waverly
Brown, at a roadblock shootout. Both were members of the Nyack Police
Department. Mrs. O'Grady's three young children were not present.
Officer Brown's 19-year-son, Greg, was also in the court-room, as was a
representative of Brink's Inc., the armored-car company.
Mr. Gribetz said members of Mr. Paige's family had chosen not to attend.
Arthur Keenan, a Nyack officer wounded in the shootout, was in the
courtroom with Brian Lennon, another Ny-ack officer at the roadblock.
Also in the courtroom were Michael Koch, a New York City corrections
officer who seized Miss Boudin as she fled from the shootout at the
roadblock, and Norma Hill, whose car was seized at gunpoint by those
fleeing the roadblock. Both were witnesses in an earlier trial of three
other defendants. The three received sentences of 75 years to life in
prison..
Mr. Koch and Mrs. Hill were expected to testify in the pro-ceedings
against Miss Boudin's co-defendant, Samuel Brown.
Father Shares the Blame
Miss Boudin's father, Leonard B. Boudin, also addressed Judge Ritter.
Seemingly drained - with his wife, Jean, looking on - he sought to take
on some of the blame.
''We are responsible in a large sense for our daughter's views on life -
the prelude to a long prison sentence,'' said Mr. Boudin, a lawyer who
has long specialized in civil-rights cases.
He said that ''we disagreed on many things, including her devotion to
black people and the third world.'' But he said she was not a
''terrorist'' and had never carried a weapon.
Miss Boudin sat next to him - her palms pressed together, her hands
against her mouth - as her father spoke of ''the day she leaves prison,
and I hope to God her mother is still alive.'' Mrs. Boudin shook her
head slowly.
Across the aisle, directly behind the defense table, were friends of
Miss Boudin and other members of her family.
Next to Mrs. Boudin was William C. Ayers - a former mem-ber of the
Weather Underground, the radical organization that Miss Boudin had also
joined. Mr. Ayers married Bernadine Dohrn in 1982, and they have custody
of Miss Boudin's 3-year-old son, Chesa.
Judge Ritter, in sentencing Miss Boudin, said the law pro-vided that she
be given life in prison.
''The only question is the minimum time she must serve be-fore being
eligible for parole,'' he said. Counting time already served, she will
be eligible for parole in 2001.
''I hope this term is a deterrent and an end to this expensive and
time-consuming case,'' the judge said.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: drawing of trial
Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company
63 of 74 DOCUMENTS
United Press International
May 25, 1984, Friday, AM cycle
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 298 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Bernardine Dohrn, former Weather Underground master-mind and once one of
the FBI's most wanted fugitives, has passed the New York bar exam, it
was disclosed Friday.
But before she can practice law, Ms. Dohrn, 42, must be approved by the
Committees on Character and Fitness of the Appellate Division of the
Supreme Court for the counties of New York and Bronx.
Ms. Dohrn, who graduated from the University of Chicago law school in
1967, took the New York state bar exam in Feb-ruary. She lives in
Manhattan.
In the late 1960s, she rose to the leadership of the Students for a
Democratic Society and following the violent ''Days of Rage'' in Chicago
in 1969 she went underground. She surfaced in 1980, when she was given
probation for charges stemming from the 1969 riots.
James Donovan, executive assistant to the Appellate Divi-sion, confirmed
that Ms. Dohrn was among 940 law students who learned this week they had
passed the New York state bar exam and that she has been certified.
Though Ms. Dohrn has been convicted of a crime, Donovan said that would
not mean she automatically would be rejected by the committee.
''It is up to the discretion of the committee,'' Donovan said.
In 1968, after the tumultous Democratic National Conven-tion in Chicago,
Miss Dohrn was described as ''the most mili-tant of all the
Weathermen.'' In 1970, the FBI placed Ms. Dohrn on its 10 Most Wanted
list.
In 1974, federal charges against Ms. Dohrn were dropped and the FBI took
her off the ''most wanted'' list.
Ms. Dohrn was jailed for civil contempt for nearly seven months for
refusing to cooperate with a federal grand jury in-vestigating a $1.6
million Brink's robbery which occurred in October 1980. She was released
in December 1982. She was never charged in the Brink's case.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 U.P.I.
64 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
May 25, 1984, Friday, AM cycle
Ms. Dorhn Passes State Bar Examination
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 393 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn, who spent 11 years
as a fugitive _ four of them on the FBI's most wanted list _ has passed
the state bar examination, her former attorney confirmed Friday.
Ms. Dohrn, who was graduated from the University of Chi-cago Law School
in 1967, must win approval from the Commit-tee on Character and Fitness
of the state Supreme Court to prac-tice law in the state.
"I think she's a reformed person" and should have no trouble passing the
committee, said the lawyer, Don H. Reuben of Chi-cago. "I think her
philosophy now is to work within the sys-tem."
James Donovan, executive assistant to the committee's city branch, said
he knew of no previous case such as Ms. Dohrn's. "Anyone who has had
trouble with the law presents problems," he said. "It's not just 'OK,
fine."'
He said the committee interviews all candidates for certifica-tion, then
makes recommendations to the court's appellate divi-sion.
Ms. Dohrn was the Weather Underground spokeswoman whose 1970
"Declaration of War" on the government was fol-lowed by bombings for
which the organization claimed respon-sibility. She spent 11 years as a
fugitive, including four on the FBI's "Most Wanted" list as an alleged
conspirator in riots and bombings.
The FBI eventually dropped those charges; Ms. Dohrn pleaded guilty to
charges stemming from the 1969 "Days of Rage" demonstrations in Chicago
and was fined and placed on three years' probation.
In May 1982, she was jailed for seven months on civil con-tempt charges
for refusing to give handwriting samples to a federal grand jury
investigating a possible terrorist conspiracy in several robberies,
including the 1981 holdup of a Brink's truck in which two police
officers and a guard were killed.
Kathy Boudin, another former Weather Underground leader, pleaded guilty
to one count of robbery and murder in the Brink's case and was sentenced
on May 3 to 20 years to life in prison. Ms. Dohrn, who is married and
has two sons, is caring for Ms. Boudin's son.
Reuben said Ms. Dohrn, who has been working as a legal assistant, was on
a camping trip and could not be contacted. He said she knew from a
letter that she had passed the exam, given Feb. 28 and 29.
Ms. Dohrn's name was listed in the New York Law Journal this week as
among the 940 people who passed, of about 2,100 who took the test.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
65 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
July 29, 1984, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS;
Bernardine Dohrn
BYLINE: By Mervyn Rothstein
SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 33, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 171 words
Bernardine Dohrn, a former leader of the Weather Under-ground who spent
11 years as a fugitive, passed New York's bar examination this year. But
to practice, Miss Dohrn, who gradu-ated from law school in 1967, had to
be approved by the Com-mittee on Character and Fitness of State Supreme
Court.
She had surfaced in 1980 and was given three years' proba-tion for her
role in violent protests. In 1982, she spent seven months in jail for
refusing to cooperate with a grand jury inves-tigating the 1981 Brink's
robbery and murder in Rockland County.
''I think she's a reformed person'' who should have no trouble being
approved, her former lawyer, Don H. Reuben of Chicago, said in May. ''I
think her philosophy now is to work within the system.'' But James
Donovan, executive assistant to the court unit, said ''anyone who has
had trou- ble with the law presents problems.''
She has not filed an application with the panel, Mr. Donovan says.
''There's no immediate deadline,'' he says. ''She can file a year from
now.''
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company
66 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
February 10, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS;
Hurdle for Dohrn
BYLINE: By Richard Haitch
SECTION: Section 1; Part 2; Page 45, Column 4; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 148 words
A major hurdle remained for Bernardine Dohrn last May af-ter she passed
the New York State bar examination: before she could practice law, she
would have to be approved by the State Supreme Court's Committee on
Character and Fitness.
Miss Dohrn, a former Weather Underground leader and fu-gitive for 11
years, received three months' probation in 1980 for her role in violent
protests. In 1982 she spent seven months in jail for refusing to
cooperate with a grand jury investigating the 1981 Brink's robbery and
murders in Rockland County.
Last July the court fitness committee had not yet received an
application from Miss Dohrn.
Robert Keegan, secretary of the committee's First Depart-ment,
representing Manhattan and the Bronx, says that under law any
application is confidential. The only thing he can con-firm, he says, is
that so far ''she has not been admitted'' to the bar.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1985 The New York Times Company
67 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
August 26, 1985, Monday, Late City Final Edition
BAR PANEL TO CONSIDER DOHRN'S FITNESS
BYLINE: By SAM ROBERTS
SECTION: Section B; Page 4, Column 3; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 847 words
She was a leader of the Weather Underground and a fugitive for nearly 11
years from charges that she participated in violent protests.
As recently as 1982, her own lawyer described her in an af-fidavit as
having ''a view of the law and a view of life and her rights and
obligations that is myopic, convoluted, unrealistic, childish, and
inexplicable'' and as a woman who ''is intractable in her views and
beliefs to the point of fanaticism.''
Today, Bernardine Dohrn - 43 years old and a married mother of three who
lives with her husband in upper Manhattan - is applying for admission to
the bar. And a court-appointed committee is considering whether she has
outgrown the style, if not the substance, of her years of protest, as
well as the degree to which her behavior is relevant to the practice of
law.
Don H. Reuben, the Chicago lawyer who filed the 1982 af-fidavit in an
effort to convince the court that it was pointless to prosecute, now
says of Miss Dohrn, ''My impression is that she's so conservative she's
dull.''
''I suspect it's children, the law, life and reading Time maga-zine,''
he said in a recent interview.
Called a Violent Terrorist
In contrast, at a hearing by the character committee earlier this month,
Miss Dohrn was portrayed as ''a violent terrorist leader'' by Lieut.
Terence McTigue, who is on a medical leave from the New York City Police
Department's bomb squad.
''It's not up to us to prove that she's a bad person,'' said Lieu-tenant
McTigue, who asked the committee to be permitted to testify. ''It's up
to her to document that she's a good person.'' The lieutenant said he
based his description of Miss Dohrn as a ''terrorist'' on Congressional
reports and other documents that recount the violent acts of the Weather
Underground.
When Miss Dohrn surrendered to authorities in 1980, how-ever, she was
charged only with participating in a riot in Chi-cago in 1969.
Miss Dohrn, who passed the state bar examination last year, declined to
be interviewed while her application was pending. She is working in the
Manhattan office of a prominent Chicago-based law firm.
''We're hopeful that they will feel that she has been, what I would call
rehabilitated, in the language of the law,'' said Har-old R. Tyler Jr.,
a former Federal judge who is representing her in the current
proceeding.
Hearing Next Month
The Committee on Character and Fitness of Applicants for Admission to
the Bar of the First Judicial Department, which covers Manhattan and the
Bronx, is expected to conduct another hearing on Miss Dohrn's
application next month.
Last year, the committee recommended about 2,000 appli-cants for
admission to the bar. Fewer than 1 percent of their ap-plications raised
questions deemed serious enough to lead to hearings by the committee.
Its hearings consider whether the problem was isolated, the time that
has elapsed since the actions or events that raised the questions and
the applicant's record since that period.
The committee's proceedings are confidential. The body is appointed by
the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, which may accept or
reject its recommendations. An ap-plicant who is denied admission by the
committee can petition the court for review.
Pleaded Guilty in 1980
Miss Dohrn graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1967.
After spending 11 years as a fugitive on charges of rioting and related
accusations, she surfaced in 1980 and pleaded guilty to two counts of
aggravated battery and two counts of bail-jumping stemming from protests
against the Vietnam War in 1969. She was fined $1,500 and placed on
three years probation.
In 1982, she spent seven months in the Metropolitan Correc-tional Center
in Manhattan for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating
the 1981 robbery of a Brink's armored truck and murders in Rockland
County.
Miss Dohrn's husband is William Ayers, son of a prominent Chicago
executive and a former Weather Underground member whom she married
during a two-day furlough from prison in 1982.
In deciding to release Miss Dohrn at the end of 1982, Judge Gerard L.
Goettel of Federal District Court said there appeared to be no furthur
purpose in jailing someone prosecutors had said ''might have been an
unwitting facilitator of the criminal activity.''
Mr. Tyler discussed Miss Dohrn's application and the 1982 affidavit,
concurred in by him as one of her attorneys and which also said Miss
Dohrn ''may well perceive herself as a second Joan of Arc.''
''I wouldn't have put the problem quite the way Don Reuben did,'' Mr.
Tyler said, referring to the affidavit's tone. In any case, he added,
''I maintain she has changed. She acts like a per-fectly typical lawyer
in a big firm. I would think she would be interested in only great
social causes. She's interested in work-ing.''
''I would be very troubled, as to the notion of fairness, if she wasn't
made a member of the bar now,'' Mr. Reuben said. ''This country makes a
point of looking at people as they are and not visiting upon them their
past silliness of their youth.''
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photo of Bernardine Dohrn (UPI)
Copyright 1985 The New York Times Company
68 of 74 DOCUMENTS
Newsweek
November 18, 1985, UNITED STATES EDITION
Dohrn's Radical Departure
SECTION: UPDATE; Pg. 15I
LENGTH: 321 words
Today Bernardine Dohrn, who spent 11 years as a fugitive from justice,
wants to go to court -- and the authorities won't let her. Dohrn, 43,
passed the New York bar exam last year and works in the Manhattan office
of Sidley & Austin, a Chicago law firm. But a state committee that
determines an applicant's moral fitness has held up her certification;
no one will say when a decision might be reached.
Dohrn joined the radical group SDS soon after getting her law degree
from the University of Chicago in 1967. In 1970, as a member of its
Weatherman faction, whe was indicted for plot-ting to bomb targets in
New York, Detroit, Chicago and Berke-ley. The charges were later
dropped, but in 1980 she surren-dered to face other charges stemming
from a 1969 political demonstration. She pleaded guilty to striking a
Chicago police officer and jumping bail, was fined $1,500 and put on
probation -- all the while declaring her opposition to "slavery,
genocide and colonialism."
In 1982 Dohrn refused to cooperate with a grand jury inves-tigating the
bloody 1981 Brinks armored-truck robbery in Rockland County, N.Y. -- she
was suspected of helping the thieves get fake driver's licenses -- and
was imprisoned for con-tempt. Her lawyer, Don H. Reuben, sprang her by
arguing that incarceration was useless since she was "intractable . . .
to the point of fanaticism."
Today one of Dohrn's bosses at Sidley & Austin describes her as "very
mature, hard working and quiet." Reuben attributes her apparent
turnabout to her age and the responsibilities of child rearing. She and
fellow radical William Ayers, 40, lived together for years and married
in 1982; they live on Manhat-tan's Upper West Side with their two young
sons, Zayd and Me-lik. "I would classify her as a dull Yuppie," Reuben
says. "She's totally apolitical. She might be the person selling cook-ies
at a PTA meeting -- and she would have baked them."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Picture, Dohrn with husband Ayers: "Dull Yup-pie"?, UPI --
BETTMANN NEWSPHOTOS
Copyright 1985 Newsweek
69 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The New York Times
December 20, 1985, Friday, Late City Final Edition
DOHR IS REJECTED BY A BAR PANEL
SECTION: Section B; Page 2, Column 1; Metropolitan Desk
LENGTH: 314 words
Bernardine Dohrn, the 43-year-old former leader of the Weather
Underground, has been rejected for admission to the New York bar, her
lawyer said yesterday.
''There is no doubt she was turned down for now,'' said the lawyer,
Harold R. Tyler Jr., ''which I hope holds, by implica-tion, the promise
that next year she can reapply.
''They feel her record since she came back into normal soci-ety has not
convinced them entirely that she's really committed to the practice of
law,'' he said. ''She is disappointed. She con-tinues to think she is
now qualified and that she presented a good record.''
He said Miss Dohrn ''continues in her effort to be a New York lawyer.''
Last year, the Committee on Character and Fitness of Appli-cants for
Admission to the Bar of the First Judicial Department, covering
Manhattan and the Bronx, recommended about 2,000 applicants for
admission to the bar. The Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court
appoints the committee.
Less than 1 percent of the applications had raised problems that, like
Miss Dohrn's, were deemed serious enough to lead to hearings by the
committee, which weighs whether or not the problem was an isolated one,
the time that has elapsed since and the applicant's record during that
period.
Miss Dohrn, who is now married and has three children, passed the New
York State bar examination last year and has been assisting lawyers in
the Manhattan office of a Chicago-based law firm. She graduated from the
University of Chicago Law School in 1967.
After 11 years as a fugitive, she surfaced in 1980 and pleaded guilty to
aggravated battery and bail-jumping charges stemming from Vietnam War
protests in 1969. She was fined $1,500 and put on three years'
probation. In 1982, she was jailed for seven months for refusing to
cooperate with a grand jury investigating the 1981 Brink's robbery and
murders in Rockland County.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1985 The New York Times Company
70 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
December 20, 1985, Friday, PM cycle
Dohrn's Bid to Join Bar Rejected
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 185 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
A former leader of the Weather Underground, Bernardine Dohrn, who was a
fugitive for 11 years, has been rejected for admission to the New York
bar, her lawyer said.
"They feel her record since she came back into normal soci-ety has not
convinced them entirely that she's really committed to the practice of
law," the lawyer, Harold R. Tyler Jr., said Thursday.
"She is disappointed. She continues to think she is now qualified and
that she presented a good record," he said.
Ms. Dorhn, 43, passed the New York state bar exam last year and has been
assisting lawyers in the Manhattan office of a Chicago-based law firm.
Ms. Dorhn, now married and the mother of three, graduated from the
University of Chicago Law School in 1967.
Ms. Dorhn surfaced in 1980 and pleaded guilty to aggra-vated battery and
bail-jumping charges stemming from protests against the Vietnam War in
1969. She was put on three years' probation and fined $1,500.
In 1982, she was jailed for seven months for refusing to co-operate with
a grand jury investigating the 1981 robbery of a Brink's truck in which
guards were slain.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1985 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
71 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
December 20, 1985, Friday, AM cycle
People in the News
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 180 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Bernardine Dohrn, a well-known radical of the 1960s who was a fugitive
for 11 years, has been refused admission to the New York State bar, her
lawyer says.
"They feel her record since she came back into normal soci-ety has not
convinced them entirely that she's really committed to the practice of
law," the lawyer, Harold R. Tyler Jr., said Thursday.
Ms. Dorhn, 43, passed the New York bar exam last year and has been
assisting lawyers in the Manhattan office of a Chi-cago-based law firm.
Ms. Dorhn, now married and the mother of three, graduated from the
University of Chicago Law School in 1967.
She became a leader of the Weather Underground, which turned to violence
in its fight against the Vietnam War and other social grievances.
Ms. Dorhn surfaced in 1980 and pleaded guilty to aggra-vated battery and
bail-jumping charges stemming from 1969 anti-war protests. She was put
on three years' probation and fined $1,500. In 1982, she was jailed for
seven months for re-fusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating
the bloody October 1981 Brink's robbery.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Laserphoto NY44
Copyright 1985 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
72 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Washington Post
December 21, 1985, Saturday, Final Edition
Personalities
BYLINE: By Lisa Serene Gelb
SECTION: Style; E3
LENGTH: 833 words
Country singer Johnny Paycheck was charged yesterday with shooting Larry
Wise in a dispute at an Ohio tavern. Pay-check, 44, was arraigned in
Hillsboro, Ohio, Municipal Court on a charge of felonious assault and
jailed in lieu of $25,000 bond, officials said.
Police Capt. Kenny Cumberland said Paycheck shot Wise with a
small-caliber pistol at about 11:30 p.m. Thursday and then fled. He was
arrested the following morning. Paycheck, a native of nearby Greenfield,
Ohio, is best known for his 1978 hit, "Take This Job and Shove It."
Cumberland said Wise was released after treatment at High-land District
Hospital. A police spokesman said officers are in-vestigating the
shooting and do not know why it occurred.
The Trouble With 'Purple'
Steven Spielberg's "The Color Purple," which opened in Washington
yesterday, is being criticized by some blacks who say the movie degrades
them. "It portrays blacks in an ex-tremely negative light," said Kwazi
Geiggar of the Coalition Against Black Exploitation, a 20-member group
that monitors films and television shows with black themes. "It degrades
the black man, it degrades black children, it degrades the black
family."
The film, based on the novel by Alice Walker, is already be-ing touted
as an Oscar nominee, but not everyone views the movie so favorably. The
portrayal of black men was "very stereotypical," said Willis Edwards,
president of the Holly-wood-Beverly Hills branch of the NAACP. "We're
happy that a lot of actors who happen to be black got to work and they
did a fantastic job," Edwards said. "But for the black male, the movie
is very degrading."
However, Los Angeles Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, a black who helped
organize a special screening of the movie for the Black Women's Forum,
said she found no fault with the film. "That movie could have been about
any color," she said.
Attempts to reach Spielberg were referred to Rob Friedman, vice
president of worldwide publicity at Warner Bros., who dis-counted any
black community discord. "Only 20 people in the whole country does not a
controversy make," said Friedman. Antiapartheid Donation
Rock singer and antiapartheid activist "Little Steven" Van Zandt handed
over checks totaling $50,000 from his "Sun City" royalties to Coretta
Scott King Thursday in Atlanta. The dona-tion will go to the Africa
Fund, a nonprofit organization that will use the money to help political
prisoners and their families, exiles and educational programs.
Van Zandt, the former guitarist for Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band,
put together the "Sun City" antiapartheid record and video. It features
rock, jazz and soul artists singing in pro-test of performers who have
appeared in Sun City, an opulent resort in South Africa.
End Notes
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the day Martha (Sunny) von Bu low,
53, a Pittsburgh utilities heiress, lapsed into a deep coma that doctors
say is irreversible. She lies in a New York hospital bed. On June 10,
her husband Claus was ac-quitted of two counts of attempted murder.
Authorities accused him of causing his wife's current coma as well as an
earlier one, in December 1979, from which she recovered . . .
The American Museum of Natural History in New York has received an early
Christmas present: A 21,327-carat topaz from Brazil, believed to be the
largest cut gem in the world, arrived at the museum Thursday. The gem,
called the "Brazilian Prin-cess," was given to the museum by an
anonymous donor last month and will be placed on display in January . .
.
Former Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn has been denied
admission to the New York bar. Dohrn, 43, who was on the FBI's "10 Most
Wanted" list, surrendered in 1980 and was fined and placed on probation
after conviction on charges stemming from violent protest to the Vietnam
war. She was later jailed for refusing to help in a Brinks robbery
investi-gation. "She is disappointed," said Harold R. Tyler Jr, one of
her lawyers. "She continues to think she is now qualified and that she
presents a good record." Dohrn has been a clerk in a Manhattan law
office . . .
Former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas said yesterday from his home
that he may write a novel while he recuperates from his lymph cancer,
and is happy with the decision he made to retire from the Senate this
year. Tsongas, 44, was released Wednesday from Boston's Dana Farber
Cancer Institute after 10 days spent trying to gain back the 18 pounds
he had lost since October.
"When I left the Senate, people could not believe it, yet this year has
been happier than any six years I spent in the Senate," he said.
"Normalcy after 15 years of fishbowl existence is mar-velous. There has
not been one moment of wishing I had run again. But the other part of it
is simply financial. Unless you're independently wealthy, politics is an
enormous financial strain." Tsongas, a lawyer, plans to return to work
Monday at the Bos-ton firm of Foley, Hoag and Eliot. "The vacation is
over," he said.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1985 The Washington Post
73 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Associated Press
August 12, 1988, Friday, AM cycle
People in the News
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 238 words
DATELINE: CHICAGO
Bernardine Dohrn says she has few regrets about her activ-ist past,
though she concedes the political movement of the 1960s was occasionally
fraught with "arrogance, sexism and racism."
"I was determined not to be like my mother's generation," Dohrn, former
leader of the Weather Underground and once listed on the FBI's "10 Most
Wanted" list, told an audience Thursday at the downtown Cultural Center.
She said she had wanted "no marriage, no children."
But Dohrn's views have mellowed since she spent 11 years in hiding and
served a seven-month prison term for refusing to cooperate with a grand
jury investigation of a 1981 Brink's ar-mored truck robbery in which
three people were killed.
Dohrn, 46, has married and has three children. She lives in Chicago,
working for children's welfare issues, with her hus-band, William Ayers,
also a onetime member of the Weather Underground who is now a teacher of
education at the Univer-sity of Illinois at Chicago.
"Remembering the past is a more revealing process than studying the
present," Dohrn told her audience. "The appeal of the '60s protest
movement comes from a simple notion _ that what you do makes a
difference."
But Dohrn said radical movements she was involved in were often
"chaotic, inconsistent and messy.
"In our militancy and intensity, we somehow lost hold of what brought us
into the movement in the first place _ a spirit of unity and democracy."
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
Copyright 1988 Associated Press
All Rights Reserved
74 of 74 DOCUMENTS
The Jerusalem Post
August 3, 1990, Friday
THE LAST REVOLUTIONARY
BYLINE: Patricia Golan
SECTION: Features
LENGTH: 3238 words
HIGHLIGHT: SHE STILL signs her letters, "Venceremos, Susan Rosenberg."
The old slogan of the Cuban revolution - We shall overcome - seems
ironic today, but not to this woman whose political beliefs have led her
to a direct confrontation with the U.S. government and the prospect of
virtual life im-prisonment.
SHE STILL signs her letters, "Venceremos, Susan Rosenberg." The old
slogan of the Cuban revolution - We shall overcome - seems ironic today,
but not to this woman whose political beliefs have led her to a direct
confrontation with the U.S. government and the prospect of virtual life
imprisonment.
"I don't consider myself an extraordinary person at all," Susan Lisa
Rosenberg declares, "but I do believe that my com-rades and I made
extraordinary decisions. If I represent any-thing, it may be something a
little different from what a North American Jewish woman generally grows
up to be."
Rosenberg, 35, is on the far left of the political spectrum, and has
been a self-proclaimed revolutionary since the late 1970s. Her path of
dissent against government policies has pro-voked an extraordinary
reaction on the part of judicial and law-enforcement authorities.
Her photo, appearing in a series of head-shots under the banner WANTED!
, shows a smiling, pretty young woman with curly hair and gold hoop
earrings.
"These fugitives are dangerous and may be armed," reads the caption in a
lurid 1984 Reader's Digest article, "Terror Net-work, U.S.A." The
article discusses "self-styled revolutionaries engaged in a war on
American society."
How did a "nice" middle-class Jewish girl end up on the FBI's
most-wanted list? How did she end up living under-ground as a fugitive
for nearly three years?
Like chasing a shadow, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand
who Susan Rosenberg is. She is both literally and figuratively locked
up.
ON NOVEMBER 29, 1984, Rosenberg was arrested at a warehouse in Cherry
Hill, New Jersey. She was moving "com-bat materiel" into a storage bin
with an accomplice, Timothy Blunk, when they were approached by a
policeman. Unable to repeat the birth date on her stolen ID, she was
handcuffed and arrested.
In the spring of 1985, Rosenberg and Blunk were tried and convicted on
eight counts of illegal weapons possession. They were sentenced to 58
years each - the longest sentence ever handed down in the U.S. for
weapons possession.
In April 1988, Rosenberg, still considered by law-enforcement
authorities dangerous to U.S. security, sat mana-cled and shackled
behind a plexiglass wall in a Washington courtroom. Along with five
other defendants (Alan Berkman, Tim Blunk, Marilyn Buck, Linda Evans and
Laura Whitehorn), who also had long histories of radical political
activism, Rosenberg was indicted again. This time she was accused of
complicity in a series of bombings in 1983 in and around Wash-ington,
following the U.S. invasion of Grenada.
Seven defendants (one had eluded the FBI net) were charged, among other
things, with "engaging in a conspiracy to resist foreign and domestic
policies of the United States gov-ernment." The defendants' attorneys
maintain the "Capitol Bombing Trial," which has still not begun, is
politically moti-vated.
Rosenberg remains in a detention centre in Washington pending completion
of the bombing trial. She has already served over five years of her
weapons-possession sentence elsewhere, much of it in isolation.
IT'S A LONG way from the Washington, D.C. jail to Can-dlewood Lake, a
serene, woodsy haven near Danbury, Con-necticut, where Dr. Emmanuel and
Bella Rosenberg have had their summer home for 21 years. A semi-retired
dentist, the 72-year-old Emmanuel Rosenberg keeps up his practice two
days a week at his Manhattan clinic. Bella Rosenberg was a theatrical
producer.
Today, most of their energies are taken up with rallying sup-port for
their only child, and with fighting each legal battle as it comes up.
"It's a matter of principle," says Bella Rosenberg simply.
Matters of principle were part of the Rosenberg household when Susan was
growing up on Manhattan's affluent Upper West Side, and Emmanuel
Rosenberg has moments when he blames himself for the path his daughter
took.
"We were always liberal, always into causes, taking part in civil-rights
demonstrations and anti-war marches," he recalls. "Susan asked to go
with me even though she was only 11 or 12 at the time. I never pressured
her."
Susan attended Walden, a progressive private school. She proved a gifted
child with a talent for singing and acting (she appeared in a montage
scene in Taking Off, an early film by Milos Forman), and was an
accomplished athlete and a straight-A student.
Politics were her passion from an early age. At 11 she wrote a paper on
the effects of McCarthyism, and at 17 she went to Cuba with an American
youth work brigade.
She was accepted at New York's Barnard College after 11th grade. Then,
declaring Barnard too isolated and protected, she transferred to City
College where she earned a degree in his-tory.
After college she became a drug counsellor at Lincoln Hos-pital in the
Bronx, in a programme run by the Black Panthers and by a group of Puerto
Rican revolutionaries called the Young Lords. She then studied for three
years to become a doctor of Chinese acupuncture and holistic medicine.
Throughout the late 1970s she was deeply involved in radi-cal politics,
or what was left of radical politics in the Reagan era. Rosenberg
managed to seek out and join such outfits as the New Afrikan and Puerto
Rican independence movements, and the May 19 Communist Organization, an
offshoot group of the notorious Weather Underground. (May 19 is the
birthday of both Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X. )
ROSENBERG'S problems with the law began in October 1981, when a Brink's
armoured truck was held up in Nyack, New Jersey, allegedly by members of
groups known as the Black Liberation Army and the Revolutionary Armed
Task Force. In the shoot-out, one Brink's guard and two policemen were
killed. At the time, Rosenberg was working in a radical health centre in
Harlem using acupuncture to treat drug addicts.
The Brink's case would prove a turning point in the U.S. government's
efforts to eliminate the last pockets of 1960s-style radicalism. Through
concerted efforts by various law-enforcement agencies, anyone who had
ever associated with the groups involved was rounded up or issued a
grand jury sub-poena.
Suspects included members of a long list of radical groups, including
May 19. Susan Rosenberg was on the list.
Some suspects went to jail rather than face questioning by the grand
jury. Although she denied taking part in the heist, Rosenberg chose to
go underground.
"I did not believe I or anyone else could get a fair trial, given the
incredible hysteria generated by the FBI around the case," she says
today.
The indictments linking Rosenberg to the Brink's shoot-out were
eventually dropped. But references to the original indict-ment
persistently appear in subsequent documents and reports.
Since litigation in her case continues, she will not discuss her two
years as a fugitive. What is clear is that having previ-ously worked
with various "liberation" and "anti-imperialist" groups, she was drawn
further into clandestine political activi-ties while living underground.
Letters written by Rosenberg and Blunk, which were confis-cated by the
authorities from a "safe house," indicated a life of combat training
combined with rounds of Marxist-Leninist self-criticism designed to help
place the collective before the self, and "to put the revolutionary
struggle first for your whole life ..."
But Rosenberg was functioning in a void; there was no revo-lutionary
movement. While she was underground, nearly all the members of her
"clandestine resistance" were jailed, many for conspiracy in the Brink's
robbery. In any event, Rosenberg remained out of sight. Until the
fateful night in 1984 when she was arrested at the arms warehouse.
AT THEIR weapons-possession trial, Rosenberg and Blunk, acting as their
own attorneys, tried to introduce a political de-fence. They described
themselves as "resistance fighters" in a "revolutionary struggle against
U.S. imperialism." They also attempted to interrogate government agents
and reveal Ameri-can war crimes, citing international law which gives
citizens the right to resist war crimes of their own nation. Among other
things, their brief outlined U.S. "crimes of colonialism" against Puerto
Rico and "genocide" against American Indians.
They seemed to think the jury and public would see the mo-rality of
their guns and dynamite, but the judge refused to allow this line of
defence.
The trial was conducted in an atmosphere of bizarre political theatre
that harked back to the days of the Yippie trial that fol-lowed the 1968
Democratic National Party convention in Chi-cago. Friends appeared in
court wearing keffiyehs and raising clenched fists. Blunk kept his feet
on the table, to show they had been shackled and that he and Rosenberg
did not recognize the court's authority.
Following their s
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